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SAIC Settles CityTime Case For $500.4 Million
First time accepted submitter arnott writes "Science Applications International Corp. said that it will pay $500.4 million in restitution and penalties under a settlement over its CityTime program with New York City. From the article: 'Two former SAIC employees have been charged with conspiring to defraud New York, and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) has called on the company to reimburse the city for the more than $600 million it spent on the program over an 11-year period.'"
and just like that my faith in humanity has been restored.
Mine also..
having had experience with SAIC in the past - one wonders how they remain in business when most of the projects turn out to be crap and have to be redone?
This sounds like something Baquack Obamailure would do! :)
I can't hold anymore!
The .4 was very important.
They hosted nice free user group on GUI design in their building 12 years ago.
Other than that it's a very big corporation with links to the military industrial complex.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I live and work in NYC. The Washington Post might love kissing billionaire technocrat ass, but Bloomberg didn't get this money back. In fact Bloomberg is responsible for letting SAIC rob over $600M on this contract, all the way until the bitter end while Bloomberg defended SAIC and its "cost overruns". As he finally admitted last Summer. It's the Federal prosecutor, Manhatttan US Attorney Preet Bharara, who clawed back this money. Though indeed even Bharara couldn't get it all back: the ripoff claimed $652M, the court awarded $540M, and the city might get from $466-518M. Meanwhile Bloomberg whined that getting the $500M wasn't done "in a more pleasant way". (FWIW, when his bankster cops were macing women on public sidewalks last Summer, he had no complaint that it couldn't be done in a more pleasant way). Bloomberg says we now have a functioning system "at a very reasonable cost", because he's not including all the costs of recovering the money in court. He defended this ripoff until the bitter end, and continues to spin it.
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make install -not war
Critics say city employees could have done the work far less expensively. Bills spiraled out of control over the years, hitting $692 million, and city investigators brought federal prosecutors into the probe after uncovering payments routed through shell companies.
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SAIC agreed to pay $370.4 million in restitution to the city, as well as a penalty of $130 million, according to a deferred prosecution agreement made public on Wednesday. The city will get $96 million of the penalty, with the rest going to the federal government.
In addition, New York City will not have to pay about $40 million of the bills it was charged.
Let me see if I got this right:
-$692 million in bills +$40 million in canceled bills + $370.4 million in restitution + $(130-96) million in penalty payments = -$247.6 million
Shouldn't the restitution payment at least cover how much NYC originally paid?
Is that given their federal track record, why would NYC give them something like this? Their prior performance at the federal level looks like the killing fields of Cambodia done on a bank statement. They're an institutional argument of why cost alone should never be a factor in awarding a contract; bang-for-the-buck instead because the feds have almost without fail gotten exactly what they've paid for from this company.
Let's see...
$0.4M in damages.
$500M in legal fees.
Sounds about right.
Open source payroll and time management fully capable of handling large enterprise requirements.
As someone who coded on the this project, (too low level to know about any theft or graft), I would say the city has gotten a real bargin. The big problem on the project is that the city is very complex and city workers are very poor at communicating that complexity into requirements. SAIC wasn't the first company to work on the project, a bunch of money was spent on the first few companies that did the work. The city had widely underestimated what it would take to make the product work, and how much the unions would push back against employees actually having to report when they showed up for work.
Important points
1. The system works pretty well, most articles about it do mention this.
2. The system handles time reporting for everything from office workers, to fireman. From regular 9-5 shifts to fireman 36hour stints. Unfortunately for NYC and its crazy union rules an off the self solution wasn't possible. Union contracts are very complex and the system handles paying people based on those contracts, which no one really understands.
3. The most important thing for city workers who I interviewed for requirements was the ability to lie about when they worked, how long they worked, weather they worked at all, and what they were doing during work. The system made this very hard, the unions made implementation very expensive. This isn't about judging people, it is just reality.
5. Big IT projects like this often fail, this is a reality in our business. SAIC despite the fraud, which should be punished, actually succeeded. And lots of really good work went into making that project successful.