NY Times: CityTime Scandal Opens Window Into Bloomberg Outsourcing Practices

The NY Times says the CityTime scandal should give pause about the Mayor of Accountability's so-called accountability measures on consulting contracts:

The official in charge of the New York City agency at the heart of an alleged $80 million information technology fraud scheme was suspended on Thursday without pay by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Comptroller John C. Liu.

The official, Joel Bondy, was chosen by Mr. Bloomberg to be the executive director of the Office of Payroll Administration in April 2004. But the payroll agency has been repeatedly criticized for its handling of the CityTime project, an automated system devised to streamline employee timekeeping, which has been dogged by delays and enormous cost overruns.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors accused several CityTime consultants — at least one of them a longtime associate of Mr. Bondy — of being involved in a scheme that manipulated the city into steering expensive contracts to businesses that they controlled, and of redirecting some of that money for their own enrichment.

The investigation is still continuing, city officials said, and could lead to more arrests. But the scandal has become one of the most serious that the Bloomberg administration has faced. And by casting a pall over an initiative that the mayor had championed as a hallmark of efficient, computerized management, the case does little to help the opinion of the administration’s outsourcing practices.

Meanwhile the rats in the Bloomberg administration were seeking to distance themselves as much as possible from this scandal:

Few people at the upper echelons of city government seemed to know Mr. Bondy well. A mayoral spokesman said Mr. Bloomberg had evidently not interviewed Mr. Bondy for the job, as is his custom with all top-level appointments. Councilwoman Letitia James of Brooklyn, who led a contracts committee hearing on CityTime last year, had not met Mr. Bondy until the hearing.

“He was sweating profusely,” she recalled. “He was stuttering. I had him swear under oath because there were contradictions all over the place.”

Joel Bondy? Uh, no, we don't know who he is. Sorry - ask us about Cathie Black!

Uh, huh.

The Daily News reported today that the scandal has widened to the NYCDOE. And as the Times says above, the lack of oversight and accountability exhibited by the mayor's administration calls into question ALL of the outside consulting contracts the Bloomberg administration has handed out.

There is more here.

As scandal marred Ed Koch's third mayoral term, this CityTime scandal, along with the other things that are brought to light as investigators begin to look into other Bloomberg administration business, especially the ones related to outside consultants, may bring down our Little Mayor's third term as well.