Accountability For CityTime Company, But Not For Bloomberg

One of the buzzwords in education these days is "accountability."

Mayor Bloomberg loves to hold other people accountable for their performance of their jobs - especially teachers.

One of the reasons he supports publishing teacher evaluations in the newspapers is so that parents can hold their kid's teachers accountable for performance.

Yes, with Bloomberg, it's always about accountability and performance

And yet, how come he isn't being held accountable for the CityTime mess?

In a city where Boss Tweed, Mayor Jimmy Walker, and Stanley Friedman all brazenly pilfered public money during eras gone by, no government scandal compares to the size and scope of CityTime.

It was "the single biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the city of New York," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Wednesday.

But thanks to a dogged joint investigation by Bharara and Rose Gill Hearn, the commissioner for the city's Department of Investigation, the crooks are paying back most of what they stole.

Science Applications International Corp., the main contractor on the CityTime project - and one of the country's biggest defense giants - has agreed to return to taxpayers the astonishing sum of half a billion dollars by close of business Thursday.

Of that money, $466 million will go directly to the city treasury and the rest to the federal government. SAIC also agreed to forgo another $40 million in bills it had previously submitted to the city.

No local or state government in the country has ever recouped so much money from a single fraud, Bharara said.

The money represents a huge chunk of the nearly $700 million taxpayers shelled out for an automated timekeeping and payroll system that mushroomed over a decade to 10 times its original pricetag of $63 million.

Sounds good, except that the person who allowed all this thievery in the first place - namely Boss Bloomberg - hasn't once answered for the scandal:

Mayor Bloomberg, who stood next to Bharara at a press conference Wednesday, called this "a major victory for taxpayers...for justice and public integrity."

But for a guy about to receive a $500,000 settlement, the mayor did not seem all that elated.

Bloomberg has not yet explained how such a massive theft - the biggest stain on his administration - could occur for so long without any of his aides noticing.

Only one city official, former Payroll Administration director Joel Bondy, has lost his job because of CityTime.

Maybe when the criminal trial of the CityTime crooks finally begins, we'll learn what our own officials knew and didn't know.

Yes, maybe then Bloomberg will have to answer publicly for his own conduct in the oversight - or lack thereof - of the CityTime project and his own administration officials who were working on it.