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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."
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.
This is SAIC we are talking about. Corruption, regulatory capture, and general parasitism-on-dodgy-private-contract-projects are basically their business model.
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???
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.
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.
If we just agreed to define, for judicial purposes, all white collar criminals as 300lb, tattooed, black men named "Tyrone"(with gang connections, if a corporation is involved), I suspect that the problem would take care of itself.