John Liu and CityTime: Saving the taxpayer money

If you have heard of John Liu, then you have probably heard of his involvement in shedding light on the CityTime project. It’s perhaps the worst scandal in the history of New York City, with hundreds of millions of dollars lost to corruption and negligence.

Former NYC comptrollers:

Alan Hevesi, who later went to jail for corruption.

Bill Thompson, who somehow missed the misuse of $600 million on his watch.

John Liu was one of the first to investigate and call attention to CityTime, which has now been exposed as an international conspiracy to pull off a scam of massive proportions. Started back in 1998 as an initiative to computerize timekeeping for city employees, the entire program was to cost no more than $63 million and was supposed to have been finished 5 years ago. However, after its inception, CityTime’s budget swelled to well over $700 million and it was still unfinished in 2010, somehow flying under the radar of the two previous comptrollers, Alan Hevesi and William Thompson, and New York’s incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg. The latter has said that, before its discovery as a fraud, he had believed that the cost increases in the project were legitimate. (A 1100% cost increase sounds legitimate??) Not bad for a project intended to cut costs and improve the efficiency of city government, huh?

Within his first year in office, John Liu uncovered and put a stop to the runaway project, which was revealed to be riddled with fraud and corruption. Liu pushed for the project to be completed without any further financial investment, and CityTime was finished only nine months later. The investigation later revealed that some $600 million (that’s 85% of the money) had gone to waste–misused, as they say, by the contractors. Liu is now working with the US Attorney’s office to recover the lost funds and put those responsible behind bars, where they belong.

To add insult to injury, prosecutors have said that the company commissioned to work on the CityTime program, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC Inc.), had received a whistleblower complaint against one of their senior managers working on the project as early as 2005. But, whether through negligence or corruption, no action was taken. SAIC’s CEO has expressed outrage over the mess and has hired a law firm to review the company’s ethics and practices. So far, a total of eleven people and a subcontracting firm have been criminally charged, another three managers at SAIC have been fired for failing to do their job, and NYC official Joel Bondy, head of the Office of Payroll Administration, which was overseeing CityTime, was forced to resign.

All in all, a job well done by John Liu and his office in finding and rooting out the problem. But the most important question remains unanswered: How the heck could so many city government officials miss this? I’m not implying that there had been corruption that far up the chain, but there is such a concept in civil law as “gross negligence”. Officials in charge of this program need to be at least questioned, if not investigated.

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