Arrest In $740M NYC Time and Attendance System Case 97
Posted
by
timothy
from the psst-your-power-trip-is-showing dept.
from the psst-your-power-trip-is-showing dept.
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."
Re:for a project that size (Score:4)
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.
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Did you have to supply the tits and ass yourself?
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I got to pick them out...the pimp supplied them.
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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?
Re:for a project that size (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but not a relational data whorehouse...now that would just be creepy.
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Well played, sir!
Re:for a project that size (Score:5, Funny)
Some dude named Upgrayedd???
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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 h
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
Corruption in NY (Score:2)
Re:Corruption in NY (Score:4, Informative)
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This is SAIC we are talking about. Corruption, regulatory capture, and general parasitism-on-dodgy-private-contract-projects are basically their business model.
Wait. What? That's the business model for the US Senate.
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It always seems to me that the US is the most corrupt first world country in the world.
You see stories like this and about a congressman throwing in an earmark for a company his uncle owns for millions of dollars and it's just taken as normal procedure ... unfortunate, but nothing to get any politician fired over. In the UK parliamentarians step down for dodgy expense claim of 10s of thousands of pounds ... in the US you get to hand out millions and get off scot free.
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Does it cover every union agreement, allowance, special case and other "Spanish practices" [wikipedia.org] - 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.
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Seize the $450M (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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I'll talk to my state representative about that.
You better accompany that talk with a million or two. Otherwise he'll laugh you out the door.
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At least the full amount.
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Not to mention that if only the executives know about it, the shareholders or owners suddenly lose their entire investment - even though, if they'd known about the behaviour in question, they might have immediately terminated the executives in question and notified the authorities.
Punishing the innocent is something I often think of as best avoided.
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I believe that's categorised under 'tough shit'. They're already granted the incredible privilege of limited liability, allowing them to destroy the planet and walk away without paying a cent in compensation, now you want them to keep the value of their investments too?
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Investors need to be punished when their governance is inadequate. Handing out punitive fines to real people but not to companies because it might hurt their poor employees and stock holders is a gross market distortion in favour of big companies.
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So, let's say you have a retirement fund. You pay in your $100/month or whatever. The fund manager invests some of the money in the fund in a company that's doing well, has a sound business model, etc. The executives of that company are, unbeknownst to the fund manager, paying kickbacks and engaging in other illegal behaviour. According to you and the OP, once this is found out, you lose a chunk of your retirement fund? How is that in any way related to any concept of justice? It doesn't matter whethe
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So it's capitalism, but you want the government to intervene to artificially increase losses by seizing assets? You believe in the free market, but don't believe it's able to punish companies who are fined or lose executives because of misbehavior?
I don't argue (and haven't argued) that the company shouldn't in some way be punished (the suggestion that the company loses all proceeds from a contract they won by kickbacks seems like a sensible starting point), only that rubycodez' suggestion that the company
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For 740 Milion (Score:3)
Obviously the system has global multi-site datacenters, rfid implants, radioactive decay biometric rsa tokens and the system gives world class hand jobs.
Capital Offense (Score:2)
Stealing from the taxpayer by government contractors or government bureaucrats is tantamount to treason.
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And just how do you propose to carry out the sentence? Soylent Green?
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I don't think that I'd want to eat a consultant; but we could probably achieve similar results by simply sentencing for the possession of however much cocaine the proceeds of their fraud could have purchased...
Make sure that is for buying rock, not powder.
Re:Capital Offense (Score:4, Funny)
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No guillotines, though. Too hard to spell.
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no, snake tastes nasty
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However, I think that moving toward a sentencing model for high-numbers white collar criminals that recognizes that they are that much more pernicious than the deeply-unsympathetic-but-really-rather-penny-ante blue collar set would be a wholesome development.
You can rack up fairly stiff sentences for frauds and property crimes with expected gains of
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I'm beginning to wonder if there are more than a dozen people on the Internet that know what treason is... Or possibly are sane.
What you've written is not only out to lunch, it indicates some sort of brain damage. Did you recently jab your finger to far up your nose?
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So... (Score:3)
Solved problem (Score:2)
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.
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Without claiming this is an excuse, the system was definitely not a simple web-based T&A system. Biometric data entry terminals were to be used in order to cut down on employee fraud, as I understand it. However, the actual cost seems so grossly in excess of the expected costs that this alone can't explain it.
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Oooooo, "biometric data entry terminals". That seems like an awfully fancy way of saying "hand scanners". One of the local manufacturing companies that I consulted for did that. It sure did not cost them $750 million dollars.
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let employees do fraud, id rather see the little common man get a little extra under the table, than see the big wigs pocket $80M +
putting on a tie (Score:2)
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.
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Re:Why am I so not surprised about SAIC... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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"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 agains
The time has come to remove the term white collar (Score:1)
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"
Re:The time has come to remove the term white coll (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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 t
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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.
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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 w
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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 th
White collar crime does more damage than most (Score:1)
Having worked for them (Score:2)
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.
While we're on the subject: (Score:2)
Is there an open source project that helps track time for employees?
$740 million for a TIMECLOCK? (Score:1)