More Bloomberg Outside Consultant Fraud

IBM was involved in fraudulent activity against the NYCDOE once before - and now they are found to have done so again:

School technology consultants ripped off the city right under the noses of asleep-at-the-switch Department of Education supervisors, a new report has found.

Monica Rhodas-Campagna — among the IBM trio who misbehaved while working on a project to install surveillance cameras in public schools — took a trip to Canada and worked for her private design firm while clocked in at the DOE, a probe by Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon found.

And husband-and-wife team Barry Jay and Lynn Harold took home video cameras and other surveillance equipment by the cart-full — then put the items up for sale on eBay, investigators said.

They told probers the equipment was going to be junked anyway.

But their misdeeds were only magnified by the sloppy supervision of the DOE, according to Condon.

Project manager Paul Ringel, who signed off on the Canada trip, said he didn’t realize he was supposed to supervise the consultants’ time sheets — telling probers, “I never questioned anyone’s time card.”

Chief tech officer Stephen Vigilante admitted not reporting allegations to investigators because he tried to look into them himself.

But when asked how, he said, “I can’t remember how I looked into it,” the report said.

CityTime, Willard Lanham and Judith Hederman/DOE fraud cases, the NYCHA computer system disaster, the 911 system mess, the Seedco scandal, the faulty GPS systems they bought for the FDNY and Sanitation Dept. - these scandals all have got the same blueprint:

Mayor Mikey hires outside consultants because he thinks city employees are lazy ass crooks who want to rob the city blind.

Then the outside consultants he hires overbill the city, go years over on deadlines, millions (or sometimes hundreds of millions) over budget, and in the cases of Lanham and Hederman with the DOE and most spectacularly with CityTime, they rob the city blind.

And yet somehow the geniuses at the DN and the Post and the Times, hand-wringing over the potential loss of $250 million in outside consultant money if the UFT does not agree to Mayor Mikey's teacher evaluation plan, never seem to add up the money that has been stolen by Mayor Mikey's outside consultants - an amount that far exceeds $250 million.

Even worse, they never note that most of that $250 million Cuomo is threatening to withhold from the city if no evaluation deal is reached will be spent on technology consultants, data tracking programs and other projects that have been rife with fraud all throughout the Bloomberg administration.

Take a look at all the links I put above for all the scandals that have taken place during Bloomberg's time - and these are the one's they've caught.

CityTime cost the city $700 million, the NYCHA computer mess cost the city $36 million, the 911 system mess cost the city $1 billion and counting, and the various other scandals add up to about $20 million.

That's over $1.75 billion dollars either stolen or wasted by outside consultants under Bloomberg's watch.

And again, these are the crimes they're catching.

You know that there are many more still to be caught (or perhaps never to be caught, since Bloomberg doesn't want to catch them himself and as the Post article makes clear, city agencies are doing little to no oversight.)

That figure puts the $250 million that the city will supposedly lose if no evaluation deal is reached into perspective.

But even more, since most of that money will be spent on outside consultants, you have to wonder just what the city will actually get for all that cash.