The CityTime scandal gets worse, if you can believe it. Yesterday Comptroller John Liu revealed that the private consultant in charge of the city's money-bleeding computerized timekeeping project was fired yesterday for—wait for it—not properly tracking his hours! Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the prime contractor on the project, says it will refund $2,470,522 to the city for the time $540,000-a-year senior project manager Gerard Denault billed to Gotham.
So what happened? "Because [Denault] did not precisely record the hours he worked, we cannot accurately calculate the amount that should have been billed to the city for his work," explained SAIC's Senior Vice President Rick Reynolds. They still swear he did a lot of work though!
This is the latest development in an already absurd story in which a seemingly simple idea (centralize the city's time keeping records for a cool $68 million) was turned into a veritable money pit that has cost the city $740 million bucks and counting—$80 million of which was allegedly stolen by consultants (always consultants!) who made the program so complex that nobody else can use it.
"This is the person in charge of keeping track of New York City employees but at the same time he was not keeping track of himself," Liu said yesterday before calling on the city to stop all payments to the company (we owe 'em $32 million). For its part, the Bloomberg administration quickly agreed, announcing that no payments would be made to the company until the Department of Investigation completes its "very active criminal investigation."
Considering this development only came to light when SAIC copped to it, something tells us there are a whole bunch more skeletons in the CityTime closet waiting to come out.
