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Arrest In $740M NYC Time and Attendance System Case
theodp writes "Mayor Bloomberg's perception of money, opines Gothamist's Christopher Robbins, is somewhat different than most non-billionaires. Just hours before the leader in the city's $740 million CityTime web-based time and attendance boondoggle was arrested for allegedly taking $5M in kickbacks, Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program that 'we actually did a pretty good job here, in retrospect.' Overshooting the projected $68M it would cost, adds Robbins, 'pretty much sounds like the exact opposite of a 'pretty good job'.' A US Attorney said SAIC Project Manager Gerald Denault was charged with accepting more than $5M in kickbacks laundered through international shell companies while steering more than $450M of city funds to the tech company behind the kickbacks. In December, CityTime consultants were charged with stealing $80 million."
...corruption in NY politics? What a surprise! The amazing thing is that SAIC managed to get a contract with the MTA after the reports of the CityTime corruption came out.
Palm trees and 8
The law should be that if a company pays kickbacks to get a contract, they forfeit all proceeds from the contract. So if they bribe someone for a $450M contract, they then should be liable for the full amount. I'll talk to my state representative about that.
What size?
The number of people it serves is unrelated to IT effort. The only impact it has is on the number of servers and databases the data has to be hosted on. The actual software is the same...1000 or 50,000.
THREE QUARTERS of a BILLION DOLLARS. That's a staff of 100 people at $100,000 each for 75 years.
I did a T&A system all by myself in 6 months for a company of 10,000 in 16 divisions making only $40k a year (this was 15 years ago).
The whole thing is absolute B.S.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Obviously the system has global multi-site datacenters, rfid implants, radioactive decay biometric rsa tokens and the system gives world class hand jobs.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Stealing from the taxpayer by government contractors or government bureaucrats is tantamount to treason.
Did you have to supply the tits and ass yourself?
I wonder how toothy the Bloomberg L.P. media coverage of this won't be?
I got to pick them out...the pimp supplied them.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Setting aside why anyone would need to spend that kind of money developing a time and attendance system, why not just buy an already established system? For example, web-based T&A systems are already used heavily in the federal government.
Hey, be nice. Fraud is a physical task, right?
I got to pick them out...the pimp supplied them.
Hopefully the details of said T&A were stored in some kind of database - or were there so many you had to use a data whorehouse?
Yes, but not a relational data whorehouse...now that would just be creepy.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Some dude named Upgrayedd???
When will we put the upper class in with the gereral population. I have a feeling a lot of this kind of this type of corruption (stealing) will stop . A guy rob's a store get $150 and does not hurt anyone and get 15y. This guy is taking money from the city budget, and we end up with more budget cuts that hurt the most in need. Put his ass in very small a cell with a guy that greats him "Boy, I bet you make a nice tossed salad"
As an ex long-term employee of SAIC I can say that SAIC has done a lot of good work in many disciplines over the years. In my opinion, the company is not now the same as it originally was, however. It went from being a solely employee-owned company (and proud of it) to a public corporation with almost entirely new management team. The transition started happening around 2003 or 2004 or so, I think (SAIC began trading its stock publicly in the fall of 2006).
Having said that, I'm aghast at the allegations over CityTime and the sheer size of what appears to be a giant debacle.
Does it cover every union agreement, allowance, special case and other "Spanish practices" - and all the exceptions, addenda and provisos pertaining thereto - in force with public employees in NYC at the moment?
I doubt it does, because from what I've been told, there's nobody alive who could tell you what they all are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Good work". I contracted there 20 years ago, and I saw people sleeping in the office, subcontracts cut with little or nothing to show for it, meetings with a dozen people and 2 who actually did any work. I went from there to Microsoft, and it was like going from Soviet Russia to the US. If you've ever done the transition from government contractor to commercial company, your perspective would change dramatically. Microsoft may have its problems now, but I'd put 1/10 the number of developers there against any team I saw at SAIC.
Great job on the FBI Virtual Case File System. If you guys had actually gotten it together, it might have prevented 9/11. The FBI just got a lot of paper for $700 million.
When will we put the upper class in with the gereral population. I have a feeling a lot of this kind of this type of corruption (stealing) will stop . A guy rob's a store get $150 and does not hurt anyone and get 15y. This guy is taking money from the city budget, and we end up with more budget cuts hurt the most in need. Put his ass in very small a cell with a guy that greats him "Boy, I bet you make a nice tossed salad"
No, but the number of categories of people do.
Given that this is a public sector project, the second number is likely to be close to the first. You probably don't have two people doing the same job being paid the same. Seniority, dog-walking leave, training absence... you name it, somebody gets it.
With 20 people, it might actually make sense to hardcode it. With a few thousand and arbitrarily complex (and possibly unknown) rules, you still might have to. Ouch.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Who said anything about hard coding? All that kind of stuff is in the maintenance tables. Each organizational group sets their own parameters and the software acts accordingly.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
A US Attorney said SAIC Project Manager Gerald Denault was charged with accepting more than $5M in kickbacks laundered through international shell companies while steering more than $450M of city funds to the tech company behind the kickbacks.
Having worked for them, I can totally see it happening. They are constantly yammering about ethics but I never saw much in the way of internal audits or investigations. Results apparently speak louder than web-based training modules.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Holy cow, you UK guys get paid for everything! I can't imagine ever getting paid overtime just because I finished my days work early. Heck, you can get in trouble for that kind of thing in the US.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Will that lead to a reduction in crime?
Or is it perhaps not a reduction in crime you're after, but base revenge?
The problem isn't the severity of the punishment (except that it's too hard for other crimes - there's a strong correlation between severity of punishment and recidivism), but the feeling these people have that they can get away with it, and not face a court at all. Because most of the time, they can, and don't.
Let's put it this way: Would you pick up a suitcase full of money if there was a 1% risk of getting caught? Would it change your decision if the penalty was increased from 2 years in jail to 10 years? Nah, didn't think so. But what if the risk of getting caught was much higher, say 25%? Would that change it?
Strip away all protections companies have that were meant for individuals only. And have any investment that balloons to more than, say, 125% of the inflation adjusted original be automatically subject to federal investigation. Yes, it will require more people. Some of the unemployed would welcome that. And it would save money.
Yeah, lets give more money to the government to stop the government from foolishly spending too much money on wasteful things! It's sheer genius.
Qui custodet custodien?
Who else can oversee government than another branch of government?
You sure can't, because if you found anything wrong, you would have no power to change anything.
Businesses can't, because they don't have any power either, and worse, they have a legal obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits, even if that money comes from the tax payers.
Yes, people in government can be greedy bastards. No doubt about that. But business leaders are greedy bastards -- it's their job.
Break the ties between the two, and you lessen the risk.
Even if it means empowering another branch of government.
Well played, sir!
-- Using the preview button since 2005
The problem is people that have qualities that make them charismatic leaders that, get them in positions of power. With that, comes all to often, no morals and ethics that reflect those they are representing or working for. Having grown up reading the Punisher comics. Wish he were real.
You must be kidding. The amount of money that was stolen outright exceeded the entire original budget! Then the actual project cost over 10 times that budget AND in spite of being a well understood task, the system is so complex that nobody but the overbloated consultancy that produced it can even run it.
The whole thing should have cost about 18 million. 6 for the software and 12 more to process the usual government paperwork to make sure nobody not in the club absconds with the 6.
If you can get white collar crime to face the same penalties (and the same prison conditions) as blue collar crime, you can expect shorter sentences and better conditions for all.
That is especially true if wealthy criminals are no more likely to go to the country club minimum security than poor criminals are.
Of course, just getting caught is only half of it. We have to make sure the "white collar" crime is actually prosecuted as well. A bunck of investment bankers screwed the entire world's economies for their personal gain and not one of them has gone to jail or even on trial.
Is there an open source project that helps track time for employees?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The problem is people that have qualities that make them charismatic leaders that, get them in positions of power.
No, I believe that's the effect. The problem is idiots who base their votes on factors like charisma. Any old grandmother who votes for someone because "he has such a honest smile" or "he's a good christian" should be taken out and shot.
We don't let people out on the road without a driver's license, but we let them do something far more dangerous: vote.
The founding fathers had the right idea: Only let the elite vote. Unfortunately, they had a couple of bad apples who convinced them that how elite you were should be measured by wealth, and not education. By ensuring that the voters would be wealthy enough to buy politicians, this ensured that every politician since then has been bough and paid for. And sold to the masses who will vote for a smile.
That's a brilliant plan right up until you run out of perfect people, but please, go ahead stating it like it's the obvious answer instead of the problem itself. After all, if we just trust that the people in government will do the right thing, it should work, so lets just give them the power.
for a govt job
I mean seriously, any decent programmer who can code well, cannot do this and would take him hours of hard labour.
Add a clean shirt, and pants, and the fact that you have to get up early 6am to get to work by 8am.
Thats just torture, I mean no real sane genius programmer can ever ever do that. NEVER.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
In my experience, you make the configuration tables so that the customer stops asking for changes. If an element is not configurable they will feel that it MUST be changed for acceptance. If it is configurable, they will be content with whatever it is when they see it. So, it isn't so much that they really want it changes as it is that they want to know they can change it. They just don't realize it.
While I agree with you in principal. Our education standards are so poor that basing it on "education" would be just as bad. I have found that the overlap of knowledge and critical thinking between those that are "educated" and those that are not is so large as to be a useless measure. If you take out the top and bottom 10% of people based on knowledge, you would have a very hard time telling who was "educated", and who wasn't.
I helped develop a payroll database pre-process for a police department, it took overtime and leave forms used by everyone in the PD and turned it in to codes used by the City's mainframe payroll system to cut checks. There were four different union contracts plus the standard city hourly/salary. The city brought in a Peoplesoft system and they wanted to integrate our pre-process into their system. We met with them and walked through how the contracts worked. It was such a joy to watch their happy faces get progressively more and more grim as we drilled in to the details and the Peoplesoft people just kept repeating "we can't do that."
I can definitely understand how complicated city payroll can be, but I don't understand how how they could let a project get so ridiculously out of control. I wonder if graft like this is typical of east coast government.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
For that you need to be able to distill out all the rules. Sometimes they won't tell you why Fred (and Fred alone) is allowed to turn up late the day after a Mets game and gets every third Wednesday off if the date is an odd number. Or they don't know. Or the answer is "he just does" or "he always has".
So what do you do, create a table with one row in it, the one for Fred?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But you can only build into your table the things you know about, and it's only worth doing that for the attributes that are frequently used. There'll always be something else, some edge case. Always.
I think it's a control/power thing. They want to see the system (and the developer) bowing to their whims.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It is a power thing. It is also a way for them to put work "they" performed on their year end reviews. Part of being a good software designer is to anticipate what they will request, and making those configurable so that you can stop scope creep from killing a project. Three or four design change requests that can be responded with "That's a great idea. We have that configurable, so you can implement that in your installation.", validates their ideas while derailing the attempt to change the code.
What the hell? How does ANYONE justify spending that kinda change for a friggin' TIME CLOCK!
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
You create a table with many rows...all exceptions to the rules. Let the users configure it.
Out of control users is no excuse. And if things like that ARE the problem, then each and every issue that caused a delay, extra coding, etc. should be well documented.
This whole thing seems like a combination of a House or Horrors, Al Capone gangsters, and the Keystone Cops.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.