Financial Genius Mayor Bloomberg Costs NYC Taxpayers $60 Million Extra On WTC Contract

Let us imagine Mayor de Blasio pulled some criminal act like this:

In a deal worked out by ex-Mayor Bloomberg, taxpayers will pay nearly $60 million extra to move a city agency seven blocks into expensive office space at Four World Trade Center, a Daily News investigation has found.

Back in 2008, Bloomberg signed off on an agreement to move the Human Resources Administration from its longtime headquarters on Water St. a few blocks west to Larry Silverstein’s tower.

The deal was part of Bloomberg’s effort to jump-start the stalled rebuilding of the Trade Center complex. At the time, the economy had imploded and Silverstein was having a tough time getting commitments to lease space in the yet-to-be-built 4 WTC.

Under Bloomberg’s pact, the deal to rent 581,642 square feet there meant paying a per-square-foot rate far in excess of what the city was paying for the Water St. digs, records show.

In the last four years of the Water St. lease - 2014 through 2018 - the city was expected to pay $26.95 per square foot.

Under the Bloomberg deal, during those same years the city will now have to pay an escalating rate that starts at $56.50 per square foot and rises to $59.50 per square foot. Silverstein had originally asked for $78 per square foot.

That comes to a total cost exceeding $100 million - way above the $46 million the city would have paid out if HRA stayed put at Water St.

And taxpayers will also have to cough up another $5 million to buy out the old lease, records show. That brings the total extra cost to $59 million.

The city is now locked into a 15-year lease where the per-square-foot rate will rise to $73.21 in the last five years of the lease, starting in 2024.

Bloomberg still has the rep for being a fiscal genius, one who saved the city from financial ruin countless times with his business acumen.

You know, like paying $73.21 a square foot instead of $26.95 a square foot for space.

Another Bloomberg NYCDOE Contractor Fraud Story

Mayor Bloomberg was a self-described financial genius who saved the city from financial ruin numerous times - and yet, the contractors his administration hired robbed the city blind.

Here's the latest:

A contractor for the city Department of Education was busted for allegedly scamming the city for more than $1 million with massive overcharges — including billing the city $572 for circuit breakers that cost a measly 18 bucks.

Derval (Eduardo) Lazzari, 54, also had his companies charge the city $157.50 a pop for over 8,000 non-existent “carbon dioxide” tests on refrigerators, federal prosecutors said.

The Queens man “cheated the New York City Department of Education and the children it educates by submitting fraudulent invoices for repairs to New York City schools,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said.

The criminal complaint said Lazzari had been running the scam since 2006, when his company, Acme American Repairs, was awarded a contract to repair cafeteria equipment in city schools.

“Beginning shortly after the 2006 contract went into effect, Lazzari instructed the billing clerk ‘to bill as close to $1,000 on ever work ticket as possible without going over,’” regardless of what work — if any — was done, the complaint says.

The contract eventually paid the company $22 million, and it was awarded a second deal in 2010, court papers say.

The big bills caught the eye of the Special Commission of Investigation for city schools, which discovered the rampant overbilling, court papers say.

The agency found “Acme repeatedly billed the DOE $572.05 for a circuit breaker estimated to cost $18,” and “repeatedly billed the DOE between $200 and $300 for electrical outlets estimated to cost between $2 and $22,” the complaint says.

The company also billed “for parts or services that were not installed and/or inapplicable to the type of repair and/or service work completed.”

Previous Bloomberg contractor and tech boondoggle stories can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Previous Bloomberg NYCDOE consultant and tech boondoggle stories can be seen here, here, here and here.

De Blasio Looks To Create Job Training Programs That Work

De Blasio says many of the jobs programs from the past (i.e., Bloomberg's) didn't work:

The city is spending half a billion a year to place out-of-work New Yorkers in low-wage jobs - and it's time to stop, Mayor de Blasio said on Tuesday. 

De Blasio, speaking at a thriving manufacturing hub in Brooklyn, announced plans to revamp all of the city's employment training programs, which he said do little to prepare would-be workers with good-paying jobs to help alleviate the income gap. 

"We don't want to place people in minimum wage jobs," de Blasio said. "That's not what we came here to do." 

He is creating a 30-member "Jobs For New Yorkers" task force - which includes labor, business and non-profit heads - that will help shift the city's focus towards finding employment in high paid jobs, as opposed to lower-paid gigs. 

Studies have shown that even as New York's job growth has inched up since the great recession, many of the jobs created have been in low-paid sectors - like hospitality and tourism - while at the same time spots in high-paying fields have shrank. 

"In the past, there's been a temptation to tout achievements in terms of job training and placement, but when you looked a little more closely some folks were in those jobs for three months, or six months or nine months and then they were out of them," de Blasio said. "That's not acceptable to us. We want jobs that people can stick with, that a family can grow with. That's what this task force will focus on."  

In September, the task force will give de Blasio a report recommending specific initiatives the city can do to train and place the out-of-work in sectors that have jobs, and pay well - like tech, manufacturing, and accounting. 

Leaders of the task force include Cesar Claro of the Staten Island Economic Development Corporation, Jukay Hsu, founder of the Coalition for Queens, and Vincent Alvarez, the president of the New York Central Labor Council.

Mayor Bloomberg used to brag about the placements people received through his jobs placement programs, but as with much else about Bloomberg's tenure as mayor, when you took a closer look at his actual "accomplishments," you saw that they were phony:

New York City’s Department of Investigation (DOI) has reported that, of 6,500 job placements claimed by Seedco, 1,400 were fraudulent. That is, those who had purportedly been helped by the nonprofit were either still jobless or they had found jobs on their own without Seedco’s help. The DOI report says that Seedco “developed systematic practices to report false placements.” One of the most remarkable findings is that Seedco got the city’s approval for shredding job placement documents for the period of 2008 to February 2011, so the actual number of fraudulent job placements might be much higher. 

If you want to see an example of the courage of a whistleblower, look to Bill Harper, a former deputy director at Seedco. In August of last year, Michael Powell of the New York Times first reported about Harper’s allegations that SEEDCO was falsifying reports of job placements for its performance on city government contracts. At the time, Powell said that Seedco tried to sully Harper’s reputation and claimed to have conducted an audit that found only 60 fraudulent job placements compared to Harper’s count of 400. A month later, Powell was back reporting on new allegations about Seedco’s job placement accomplishments. This time around, both the city oversight agencies and Seedco itself were less defensive and dismissive, and Seedco promised corrective actions such as reviews and retraining of staff. 

Though Seedco’s relatively new senior management is promising to make additional changes, the new charges are obviously not good news for the organization. Powell reports that federal prosecutors are looking at Seedco’s job placement contracts and the city has announced that it will take away Seedco’s $7 million annual contract and give it to a different nonprofit.  

Why did a great and respected nonprofit allegedly get involved in this kind of behavior? According to Powell’s article, “The employees at Seedco…described a culture of unrelenting pressure from the Bloomberg administration to produce data showing that the job placement effort was working. Each year, city officials increased the targets for placements, even in the midst of a deep recession. The city required contract agencies to give weekly, monthly and quarterly reports of progress. City officials graded their progress, giving good marks to those with high numbers of placements, and poor grades to those that fell behind.” Staff reported that managers pressured them to fake job placements and learned tricks for fabricating job placement reports.  

Under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the city has emphasized performance-based contracting, making Seedco’s competition for new contracts, such as a contract for a new workforce center in the Bronx that it wanted at the time, dependent on showing the numbers. Faking the reports had reportedly become part of Seedco’s organizational culture of responding to Bloomberg’s city hall pressure.

Of course that's one of the past jobs programs de Blasio is alluding to when he announced his jobs program task force.

Classic Bloomberg criminality- and yet, many people in this city still think he was a great mayor.

One Final Bloomberg Boondoggle

From the Daily News:

In one of its final acts, the Bloomberg administration pushed through a costly contract to modernize the city's 311 call system — hiring the same company fired by the feds for the botched rollout of the Obamacare website.

The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, known as DoITT, awarded the contract to the Montreal-based company CGI on Dec. 31, hours before Bill de Blasio was sworn in as mayor.

Bloomberg administration officials were keen on approving the deal because the former mayor sees the 311 hotline as one his legacies, sources said.

But rival companies are up in arms, saying CGI has little if any experience managing call centers. A website, Dont911nyc311.com, has popped up to protest the contract.

CGI has never overhauled “a 311-type system,” said a source in the information technology industry.

“We’re transferring a service New York City provided to its people to a service New York City is contracting to outside parties to do. It’s a serious situation.”

The contract will cost taxpayers $10 million this year — and potentially tens of millions more in future years.

This is the same kind of Bloomberg behavior that brought us the 911 system overhaul - the one that cost over $2 billion dollars, is years behind schedule and still doesn't work right.

Same as the CityTime boondoggle as well.

How the press never went after Bloomberg on the 911 system, the CityTime mess and the other contract boondoggles is beyond me.

You can bet they'll go after de Blasio if he does the same.

But Bloomberg essentially gets a pass - no meme about what an incompetent steward of city contracts he was.

Again I Ask, Why No Blame For Bloomberg And Walcott?

The Post does another story on horror school PS 106 this morning:

Kids at Queens’ notorious “School of No” have been forced to pay for a bizarre fifth-grade party at which their principal makes them dress up as little brides and grooms, The Post has learned — as the DOE announce that it would probe conditions at the school.

PS 106’s fur-clad principal, Marcella Sills — who is known for frequently being absent — has for at least the past three years orchestrated an annual prom at a posh rental hall.

She has required parents to pay more than $110 per child for the shindig.

The girls must rent little white dresses that look like bridal gowns, and the boys must attend in tuxedos, sources told The Post.

The kids, many of whom live below the poverty line, must foot the bill for the strange get-ups, which Sills personally picks out at stores such as Men’s Wearhouse and David’s Bridal, parents and ex-teachers said.

Sills, meanwhile, sets herself up as the belle of the ball — donning her own long, white bridal-type gown for the event, which was held last June at Russo’s on the Bay in Howard Beach. The outfit comes complete with elbow-length white gloves, witnesses said.

“It’s absurd,” said one former teacher at the crumbling Far Rockaway school.

“This is a school where children are given a free breakfast and free lunch, and you’re asking them to pay money for a lavish, unnecessary event.”

According to the Post article, while the principal forces families to spend money on this Belle of the Ball stuff, the school struggles to provide basic supplies and instruction for students.

No gym, no art classes, no textbooks, no nurses's office.

Former staff and students do not mince words about Marcella Sills:

Staff described PS 106 as a dysfunctional campus with rat-infested instruction trailers.

Sills often doesn’t show up. Last week, she missed every school day but one. Nevertheless, she managed to rule in absentia through fear and retaliation, sources said.

She cuts quite a figure, when she does appear. She arrives in a BMW wearing expensive fur coats. She makes a base $128,000 salary. “She’s evil,” former PS 106 teacher Patricia Walsh said. “She finds pleasure in ruining people’s lives.”

“She’s been getting away with it for years,” said Silaka Cox, an NYU freshman who graduated from PS 106 on Sills’ watch.

Two questions to pose here:

First, if Sills has been ruling her medieval fiefdom like this for years, why no blame from the Post for the former chancellor, Dennis Walcott, or his boss, Mayor Bloomberg?

Didn't most of this malfeasance happen under the watch of Walcott and Bloomberg?

Second question - how many other PS 106's are out there?

Bloomberg made every principal the CEO of their school and destroyed much of the oversight apparatus that used to ensure compliance with such niceties as providing a nurse's office instead of holding a Belle of the Ball party.

You can bet PS 106 isn't the only place where a principal has run amok with no oversight or accountability.

What's worse, with the new evaluation system in place, they basically have total power to do what they want to whomever they want with little that can be done to stop them.

Farina says she's sending a deputy chancellor to PS 106 to see what's going on.

That's a start - but how about putting a clamp on principal power at the policy level so that they cannot rule a school with fear and intimidation like Sills has done at PS 106?

Outside Contractor Who Stole $2.7 Million From NYCDOE Sentenced For Fraud

Let's see there was CityTime and the 911 system boondoggle and the NYCHA computer system mess and the FDNY GPS's that don't work and ARIS and the Willard Lanham fraud and the Judith Hederman fraud and now this:

A Pennsylvania man was sentenced today to 57 months behind bars for fooling the Department of Education into paying him $2.7 million after he lied about providing special-education and bilingual services to students.

Nelson Ruiz, who collected the taxpayer-funded cash from 2008 to 2012 through six companies he controlled, will also serve three years of supervised release following his prison sentence for defrauding DOE and also furthering the scheme by bribing an agency staffer. Ruiz, 36, of Shohola, Pa., copped a plea to masterminding the scheme in December.

Before being sentenced in Manhattan federal court, his lawyer, Don Savatta talked openly to Judge John Koeltl about how Ruiz started the scam by “accident,” first submitting “incorrect” invoices to DOE that he wound up being paid for. Savatta said Ruiz then purposely submitted phony papers a second time as a “test” -- and after DOE still couldn’t catch the false information and paid him again, Ruiz couldn’t stop himself from repeating the process.

“Mr. Ruiz acknowledges it was greed and easy money that drove him and is embarrassed and ashamed that it did not stop years ago,” Savatta told Koeltl.

Ruiz through his plea deal agreed to fork over the $2.7 million related to the crime.

We are so lucky we have had fiscal genius Mike Bloomberg to steward this city for the last 12 years.

I mean, how could this city have survived with Mike Bloomberg?

No Accountability Measures In Place For NYCDOE Educrats

Accountability, it seems, is only for the little people:

Top administrators at the city's Department of Education haven't been subject to formal evaluations during the Bloomberg administration, a break from past practice and an unusual occurrence among school districts across the U.S.

The disclosure follows the culmination of a yearslong battle by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to implement tougher teacher and principal evaluations in the district.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who has been on the job since April 2011, said formal job reviews weren't necessary because he informally evaluated his staff daily, and he was evaluated daily by the mayor. Teachers, he said, were in a different position.

"They're in front of the classroom and teaching our children, and we need to have a sense of how well they're doing," he said. "With us, we're not teaching children directly, we're setting policy. And I don't think it's hypocritical at all."

Oh, yeah - that's not hypocritical at all.

Teachers are in front of a classroom teaching "our" children while the NYCDOE educrats/hypocrites are in Tweed courthouse setting policies that affect those teachers who are in front of a classroom teaching "our" children - but that doesn't affect "our" children at all.

Who's Walcott kidding?

The Wall Street Journal goes on to show that none of the top officials at Tweed get formally evaluated ever:

The Wall Street Journal filed a public records request in February 2012 seeking the senior-staff evaluations after the department successfully fought to release scores for individual teachers' performances based on students' test scores.

In a response dated June 11, the department's public-records officer said no evaluations had been created since at least 2001 for the following positions: chancellor, chief of staff, chief academic officer, senior deputy chancellor, chief schools officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, deputy chancellor and general counsel. Mr. Bloomberg has appointed three permanent chancellors.

...


Superintendents across the U.S. are usually evaluated under a formal process, generally by elected boards of education, said Bruce Hunter, associate executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. The reviews are intended to help superintendents improve, he said. An increasing number of superintendents are also judged by their staff and community members, he said. "The jargon for it is a 360 evaluation," he said. "Almost nobody goes without evaluation now."

Superintendents in several other districts controlled by the mayor, such as Boston and Washington, D.C., also receive formal evaluations every year.

Before Mr. Bloomberg won control of the school system in 2002, evaluations of chancellors were comprehensive and touched on many areas under a superintendent's purview.

Former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew's last evaluation praised him for progress on issues such as reading scores and the expansion of prekindergarten but criticized him on several points, including the school-construction plan, according to media reports at the time. Mr. Crew, who was fired in 1999, couldn't be reached for comment.

Klein and Bloomberg (through his spokesperson) defended the lack of formal evaluations for the top Tweedies by saying that Tweed educrats were informally evaluated daily and anybody who wasn't up to snuff was "terminated."

That claim may not stand up to scrutiny, as it has previously been demonstrated that Tweed rarely fires a principal for misconduct, incompetence or anything else that might lead to termination in Bloomberg's beloved private sector.

What's worse, in negotiations with the DOE, UFT President Michael Mulgrew says the Tweedies were always promoting the need for formal accountability for teachers because everybody needs to be evaluated:

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said the DOE would argue during teacher-evaluation negotiations that "all workers get evaluated."

"It's a monument to hypocrisy," he said. "They're setting policy and making decisions that affect over 1 million children, and they don't feel they need to be evaluated in any formal way whatsoever?"

Indeed it is.

But not a surprise in the Bloomberg administration, where a lack of accountability for the people in power has been a hallmark of his governance.

Bloomberg Refuses Accountability For 911 System

It's always somebody else's fault and his beloved technology always works the way it was supposed to:

Mayor Bloomberg defended the city’s 911 system Thursday even as one of the candidates to succeed him blasted it as a failure and vowed to overhaul it.

Bloomberg said it was “very tragic” that little Ariel Russo was left waiting for an ambulance after she was fatally struck by an SUV, but blamed individual dispatchers.

“The software worked exactly the way it was supposed to be,” Bloomberg told reporters, including our Tina Moore. “There clearly was something wrong with somebody sitting in front of the screen, and maybe two people sitting in front of screens. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do and we’re looking at the procedures. It’s very tragic.

“But it was not a software thing. That’s just ginned up by unions who don’t like the fact that we have combined all of the call takers together, basically,” he insisted.

Juan Gonzalez has reported that the problem was with the software, not human error.

The Daily News editorial writers wrote the same.

Bloomberg once again refusing accountability for his tech messes - and this one perhaps resulted in a fatality.

Michael Bloomberg Belongs In Jail Next To Beverly Hall

Via Diane Ravitch, here is Sol Stern at The Daily Beast comparing Georgia governor Sonny Perdue's response to the Atlanta cheating allegations compared to Michael Bloomberg's here in NYC:

As I read about the indictments, I could not help but compare what Governor Perdue did in Atlanta with the way Mayor Michael Bloomberg handled allegations of test fraud during his 12 years at the helm of New York City’s schools. Like Beverly Hall and other Atlanta officials, Bloomberg proclaimed miraculous gains in student achievement as a result of the reforms he instituted after the state legislature gave him control of the city’s school system in 2002. In the midst of his 2005 reelection campaign Bloomberg invited the city press corps to PS 33, an elementary school in one of the Bronx’s poorest neighborhoods to hear about one of those academic miracles. The school and its principal, Elba Lopez, had just hit the jackpot on the state’s fourth-grade reading test. Over 83 percent of the 140 fourth-graders scored at or above proficiency (or grade level), Mayor Bloomberg announced, compared with only 35.8 percent proficiency in 2004. Like Atherton Elementary in Atlanta, this was a “statistically improbable” one-year gain of close to 50 percentage points. The scores for these predominantly minority and poor students were just four percentage points below the average for the richest suburban districts in the state. According to the mayor, the test results proved that his education reforms “really are paying off for those who were previously left behind.” Not a single reporter at the press conference questioned the mayor’s claim of historic, unprecedented educational gains.

Shortly after the test scores were announced, Elba Lopez retired, collecting a $15,000 bonus for her school’s spectacular performance, thus boosting her pension by as much as $10,000 per year. In 2006 the same cohort of students, now fifth-graders, fell back to a pass rate of only 47 percent, and the pass rate for the new crop of fourth-graders was just 41 percent. After I reported this startling turnabout in City Journal and reporter Andrew Wolf did the same in the New York Sun, it became fairly obvious that someone had tampered with the students’ 2005 exams. With Mayor Bloomberg successfully reelected, even his own Department of Education (DOE) felt some pressure and said it would take a second look. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein asked his Counsel, Michael Best, to refer the matter to the city’s Department of Investigations (DOI). But Best left the referral on his desk for six months. (“I goofed,” he said, when I asked why he delayed the referral.) But the DOI, whose head Richard Condon is appointed by the Mayor, declined to take the case. It was then left to the DOE’s small and understaffed investigative unit to follow up. The department had waited almost two years to start an investigation, and by this time the suspicious test papers had been destroyed.

In a report issued almost four years after the tests were administered the department’s lone investigator found no wrongdoing, yet neglected to interview PS 33’s principal Elba Lopez. As the New York Post explained in its singularly pithy way, City clears self. When I asked DOE counsel Best how the most likely suspect could be cleared without even an interview, he responded that the department’s investigator “couldn’t find her.” A few months later, New York Post reporter Yoav Gonen located Lopez at her apartment in the Bronx, exactly where she had always lived. Lopez assured the Post that there was no cheating; the reason that the students didn’t maintain their spectacularly high scores for more than one test cycle, she explained, was that the school had a new, inexperienced principal.

I have written over and over that if Mayor Bloomberg's tenure here as mayor was given a going over with a fine-toothed comb by an independent auditor not beholden to the mayor and not needing future employment and/or largesse from either the mayor or his corporate buddies, the crime statistics, the fire fatality statistics and the emergency response time statistics, the test scores and the graduation rates would all be found to be fraudulent.

Here's an example outside of education and crime of how Bloomberg funks with the numbers here in the city.

Currently Bloomberg claims New York City has the lowest fire fatality rate in history - and the mayor says this is because they have the fastest response time they have ever had:

"With record low number of murders and shootings and the fewest fire deaths in our city's history, 2012 was a historic year for public safety," Bloomberg said. "The FDNY has consistently improved fire safety over the past decade and has continued to drive response times to historic lows. These achievements and the efforts by our firefighters, EMT's and paramedics to save lives - while putting theirs on the line - is the reason fewer New Yorkers died as a result of fire in 2012 than ever before."

But a notorious report done at the behest of the city by Winbourne Consulting on the city's troubled 911 system found the following:

The group also accused the city of using inaccurate response times, since the city fails to include the amount of time it takes for a 911 operator to answer a call and loop in the relevant dispatcher — as other cities do.

“This practice inhibits the ability of the NYPD and FDNY Fire and EMS to generate accurate Response Time Information,” the report writes.

In other words, the historically low response time that the mayor is claiming to have is based on a phonied up practice that allows the FDNY to ignore the time 911 operators take with callers.

 

If the mayor's claims about the lowest fire fatality rates in NYC history are based on phonied up response time rates by the FDNY, it raises questions about the mayor's historical claims on fire fatalities.  

 

Are they based on phonied up data too?

Given the data manipulation and stat juking the Bloomberg administration has done with the education and NYPD statistics, I think the fire fatality statistics merit a second look, although I doubt anybody is going to question the mayor's claims of fire fatalities registering at historic lows.

As Sol Stern noted in his Daily Beast piece, reporters rarely challenge Bloomberg's claims of historic gains, whether they be in education statistics, crime statistics or anything else

In addition to the data manipulation and stat juking, if Bloomberg's consultant contracts and technology contracts and dealings were ever given the same once over by an independent auditor, New Yorkers would discover that the Bloomberg administration has allowed more money to be stolen during the mayor's tenure than at any time in this city since Boss Tweed ran New York from his clubhouse.

But Mayor Bloomberg, the second richest American, is not going to receive that once over - not by a press that he owns, not by politicians who fear his PAC and his wrath.

Quite frankly, if Beverly Hall is put in prison for tampering with student test papers, along with other charges such as “racketeering, theft, making false statements and false swearing," if she is facing jail time for creating "an environment where achieving the desired end result was more important than the students’ education," than Michael Bloomberg and his chancellor Joel Klein belong in cells next to her.

And as long as we're talking criminal liability for stat juking and data manipulation, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly certainly should be investigated as well.

I am under no illusion that that will happen, of course.

The black woman formerly running the Atlanta school district, along with the largely black educators who were indicted with her, will face justice in their scandal.

But the rich white man who owns NYC, along with his white male toadies like Klein and Kelly, will almost certainly not.

Another Bloomberg Consultant Scandal Revealed

These outside consultant scandals in the Bloomberg government just keep accumulating:

Investigators were called in to examine an $11.5 million city technology contract yesterday after Comptroller John Liu uncovered what he described as questionable billings that could lead to “potential fraud.”

The comptroller lashed out at managers at the Department of Consumer Affairs, charging they were so obstructive that he aborted the audit in midstream and sent his findings to the Department of Investigation.

“These red flags are risk factors that signal potential fraud and that’s what makes the agency’s interference especially troubling,” Liu said.

Liu’s office had been examining a contract signed in 2007 with Gartner Inc. to oversee an online payment system being built for businesses that are licensed by the DCA and other city agencies. The original deal was for $2.7 million. It has since grown to $11.5 million, with $10.4 million paid.
Among the findings of the aborted audit:

* Consultants who were paid between $210 and $298 an hour submitted some time sheets that appear to have been “created” just for the auditors.

* One time sheet, supposedly from January 2011, listed a Gartner project manager who didn’t start working on the project until February 2012.

* The DCA paid Gartner $113,000 for specialized training of its chief information officer, Christopher Montgomery, that had nothing to do with the contract. Montgomery left in April to become chief technology officer at NJ Transit. He didn’t return calls.

* The DCA failed to claim $65,000 of a $250,000 discount offered by Gartner.
In a letter to Consumer Affairs Commissioner Jonathan Mintz, Liu’s audit chief, Tina Kim, said the level of obstruction by Mintz’s agency made the audit impossible.

Andrew Spender, a spokesman for Gartner, issued a statement saying it had “fully cooperated” with the comptroller.

DCA spokeswoman Abigail Lootens called Liu’s report “irresponsible” and said the DCA “made each requested witness and every one of thousands of documents fully available.”

Lootens insisted there was no hanky-panky with the time sheets.

“They weren’t created,” she said. “A new copy was printed out to fulfill the auditor’s request.” Officials also said that the project’s initial $2.7 million cost was only for a first phase.

I've said it before, I'll say it again:

If any independent auditor ever got to look at the Bloomberg books on technology contracts, consultants and they like, they would find massive fraud on a Boss Tweed scale.

But the fix is in on that kind of thing, so instead we get a DOJ smear campaign against Comptroller Liu for alleged campaign finance fraud.

Meanwhile the outside consultants hired by Bloomberg are robbing the city blind and nobody seem to do anything about it until it becomes so egregious that it cannot be ignored (a la CityTime.)

Another Tutoring Company Found To Have Bilked DOE Out Of Millions

Bloomberg claims he will have to cut 2,500 teacher jobs over the next two years as a result of losing the 4% increase in state aid that was contingent upon a new teacher evaluation agreement.

Of course the majority of the cuts will come from schools rather than the central Tweed budget.

And even as Bloomberg is claiming he has to cut these teaching jobs in order to keep the city budget in the black, we get word of another consultant company bilking the DOE out of millions:

A substitute teacher was busted yesterday for an alleged long-running tutoring scam that overbilled the Department of Education for hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds.

Michael Logan, 48, of White Plains, allegedly recruited former students to help in his scheme, hiring them as “aides” for after-school tutoring in The Bronx at the Monroe and Columbus high schools, which racked up $2.3 million in bills between 2005 and 2012.

But instead of helping disadvantaged students boost their grades, Logan had them round up signatures from kids at sports practice to falsify attendance sheets for the now-defunct TestQuest tutoring company, court papers say.

And if they couldn’t find enough students to fill out the forms, Logan — a TestQuest manager — allegedly told the aides “to sign the sheets themselves.”

“I already got paid, this is how you get paid,” he said, according to a Manhattan federal-court complaint.

Logan has been barred from teaching pending the outcome of his charges.

Meanwhile, the feds yesterday joined a whistle-blower suit against TestQuest, claiming its management “knew about, deliberately ignored or recklessly disregarded the fraud.”

TestQuest founder and CEO Tiffany Hott didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

The TestQuest bilking is not an isolated incident. 

Comptroller John Liu found another tutoring company - a company the DOE just gave another multi-million dollar contract to - has bilked the DOE out of millions over the past few years and is under federal investigation:

The largest provider of after-school tutoring services for city public schools pupils, Champion Learning Center LLC, has been under investigation since last summer by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, the Daily News has learned.

The federal probe came to light this week after City Controller John Liu refused to approve a new $4.5 million contract the Department of Education awarded the company in November.

“There is sufficient reason to believe that the proposed contractor is involved in corrupt activity,” Liu said in a Jan. 11 letter to the Department of Education, a copy of which The News obtained under a Freedom of Information request.

The firm, Liu noted in his letter, has twice been found to be improperly billing the city for its services — once by the department itself and once by Liu’s auditors. As a result, Champion has been forced to repay more than $6 million since 2009.

In addition, Liu said, the firm revealed in an Oct. 9 update to the city’s VENDEX system that it is the target of an ongoing federal civil probe.

 

Now neither of these instances of overbilling or fraud involving Champion Learning Center or TestQuest add up to $250 million.

 

But these are the instances of fraud and overbilling that have been caught.

 

I could add the Willard Lanham fraud of the DOE for $1.4 million and the Judith Hederman fraud of the DOE for $43 million to the Champion and TestQuest fraud and we're starting to get into some real money here.

 

Not to mention the CityTime fraud ($600 million stolen) and the 911 system that is now $1 billion overbudget and years overdo.

I bet if an outside auditor looked at the other DOE and city contracts with outside companies, they'd find many other instances of fraud and overbilling too.

So Bloomberg can play prudent fiscal genius with his last budget all he wants - the truth is, this $250 million in lost aid is nothing compared to the money Bloomberg has allowed the outside consultants to steal during his tenure as Incompetent-In-Chief.

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.

Alex Pareene: How Come Bloomberg Not Held Accountable For Schools Disaster?

Alez Pareene mocks both Michael Bloomberg and The Atlantic in his Salon column for the latest example of a media suck-up to Bloomberg:

If you hate Michael Bloomberg you will find a lot to hate in his conversation with the Atlantic’s James Bennet, part of the magazine’s gag-inducing “Brave Thinkers” issue. What makes Bloomberg a “brave thinker”? Banning soda, it seems like. (Also, lord, no one needs another Bloomberg interview. If you want to know what he thinks about things, he is on the radio every week and he owns a news outlet that has an opinion section devoted in part to opinions he agrees with.)

You will also find some things about Bennet to be annoyed with, like his complete indifference to Bloomberg’s approval of the NYPD’s various major violations of civil liberties and general complete lack of oversight. The words “NYPD,” “Muslim,” “frisk” and “surveillance” never come up once in the full transcript of the interview.

New York’s billionaire mayor is as self-satisfied as ever, and he is very proud of his low approval ratings.

...


There are a bunch of other things that conveniently don’t come up (New York’s poverty rate and severe wealth gap, the taxpayer-funded stadium bonanza Bloomberg ushered in) but the most annoying omission is that Bloomberg, who has always wanted to be known as the man who saved New York City public schools, is not actually held accountable for the fact that after three terms under mayoral control, Bloomberg’s policies have not actually demonstrably improved public education in New York, and the huge gains Bloomberg trumpeted in his first two terms were shown to be largely illusory. (And hey, remember Cathie Black? Bloomberg’s biggest media fans don’t!)

Bloomberg does volunteer, himself, without prompting from Bennet, that “[we] haven’t improved the schools as much as we want.” Or, arguably, at all! Oddly, that has not led to any sort of reexamination of his beliefs on education policy — beliefs that both major political parties basically share.

But as the mayor kicks off his last-year-in-office national media victory tour, I imagine we won’t hear a whole lot about the failure of his signature policy goal. (Or, you know, everyone will just blame teachers unions.)

No, we probably won't hear much about those failures because most people in the corporate media (or the wanna-be corporate media) are afraid that someday they may need a job from Bloomberg, the media mogul, so instead we get suck-up pieces like this crap from The Atlantic.

Or this one from Martha Stewart's Whole Living that celebrates Bloomberg as a "Food Visionary" for banning biggie soda drinks.

You'll note how the latest phase of the Bloomberg media suck-up has dubbed Herr Bloomberg as a "visionary" "thinker".

Meanwhile members of the city council exploded on the D.O.E.’s chief academic officer Shael Polakow-Suransky over the DOE's lack of transparency and its refusal to take responsibility for mistakes or policy.

Instead they blame others - teachers, principals, networks.

Nothing "visionary" about any of that.

That's just an old-fashioned shirking of responsibility and a refusal to be held accountable to the same standards that they hold everyone else accountable to.

That's a marked trait of the Bloomberg administration and of Bloomberg the Man himself.

But you never hear about that in the Bloomberg suck-up pieces.

Or about CityTime.

Or the NYPD ticket-fixing scandal.

Or the $2 billion 911 system that is years overdue and a billion overbudget.

Or the various other consultant scandals.

Or the people who died during the Bloomberg Blizzard of 2010 because Bloomberg The Visionary couldn't get the outer borough streets plowed and emergency vehicles couldn't get through.

Just once I'd like to see the Oprah or Martha publications (or the Times, Post, Daily News, Atlantic, etc.) cover those topics while they're sucking up to the mayor.

Bloomberg Declares Himself The "Mayor Of The World"

You can't make this up:

Not content with an unprecedented three-term stint at the helm of New York City, Michael Bloomberg is preparing to judge his peers from around the United States by his own exacting standards.

Launching a $9m competition to find the best new ideas for how to improve American cities, Bloomberg declared he wanted to share his talents with other municipal administrations he when leaves his City Hall eyrie for the last time in January 2014.

The "mayor's challenge" appears to be the latest step in what has been dubbed Bloomberg's plan to be "mayor of the world", in which would bring the experience gained at the head of New York City to bear on other administrations facing similar problems.

Like other initiatives that Bloomberg has championed in cities around the world, this latest one will be funded from his own ample pockets. Asked by Charlie Rose on CBS television about his motivations for launching the competition, Bloomberg replied: "I don't know what I'm going to do when I finish this job at the end of 2013, but I could do a lot worse than trying to help other cities. Everybody said I should worry about New York, but I'm part of America and the world, and I want all cities to do well."

The contest provides for a prize of $5m for the winning city, and additional awards of $1m for four runners-up. Any city in the US with more than 30,000 residents can enter, with the idea being for them to share their insights and actions so that other cities can benefit from them.

He really thinks he's the most awesomest thing since sliced white bread with non-transfat topping on it.

Never mind that crooks stole $700 million from the City Time project on his watch, the largest theft perpetrated against the City of New York ever.

Never mind that his 911 overhaul is $1 billion overbudget and costing people's lives because of delays.

Never mind that people died, including a baby, during the Bloomberg Blizzard of 2010 when Bloomberg flew to Bermuda and left a guy in charge of the city's emergency response who was actually in Washington D.C. at the time.

Never mind all the other scandals that have plagued the Bloomberg Regime - from the Seedco scandal to the Medicaid reimbursement mess to the faulty GPS systems he bought for the FDNY and Sanitation Departments to the DOE crony consultant scandals (see here, here, and here) to the phonied up crime NYPD crime stats to the faulty NYCHA computer system that he spent $36 million on to the, well, you get the idea.

Never mind all of that.

Mike Bloomberg is the bestest mayor ever and he's going to throw his stinking money around until you just can't help but believe it.

Another Bloomberg Scandal - the 911 Emergency System That Is $1 Billion Overbudget

Bloomberg said New Yorkers had to overturn term limits and give him a third term as mayor because only his fiscal genius could save the city from financial ruin.

He said this even as the CityTime crooks were stealing $700 million from the city, various DOE crooks were stealing tens of millions, the GPS system for the NYFD and Sanitation Departments were showing trucks in the East River at a cost of $17 million and the NYCHA computer system was causing tons of problems even though Bloomberg had spent $34 million on it.

Now comes another scandal - the 911 emergency system:

City Hall aides repeatedly bungled supervision of a massive upgrade of the 911 system, even as the project fell years behind schedule and its cost ballooned by as much as $1 billion, an audit has found.

When Mayor Bloomberg launched the 911 project in 2004, he promised a seamless system that would replace antiquated police, fire and EMS call-taking and dispatch functions with 21st century technology. It had a price tag of $1.3 billion and was supposed to be done in three years.

City Hall now concedes the cost has zoomed to at least $2 billion, and Controller John Liu will claim Wednesday that the price tag is closer to $2.3 billion.

Liu will also release an audit that concludes management failures dogged the multiagency project almost from the start. It blames City Hall aides for repeatedly failing to address the problems.

"Key decisions are not being made in a timely manner," warned the Gartner Group, the city's own quality control consultant on the project.

Its memo urged "active participation by City Hall" in resolving the conflicts.

Much like the notorious CityTime payroll project, the 911 upgrade kept devouring astonishing amounts of money while getting delayed.

A new Brooklyn 911 center that was supposed to be finished in 2007 did not become fully operational until late last year. A second emergency center originally scheduled for the same time in the Bronx - as a backup in case of terrorist attack or natural disaster - will not be ready until 2015.

...

By May 2009, Gartner's warnings became more dire about the mushrooming costs and continuing lack of direction on the project.

The interagency steering committee had "little or no participation by City Hall representatives," Gartner wrote in May 2009. "All City Hall meetings have been canceled."

By then, it was clear that some major vendors on the project, such as Verizon and Hewlett-Packard had provided equipment and technology that was performing inadequately, the audit said.

Hewlett-Packard was eventually bounced as the project's chief system integrator, and the city is demanding more than $50 million from Verizon for the delays it caused.

In her official response to Liu's audit, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Carole Post did not object to any of its findings.

"The city long ago identified the issues raised in the current audit, and had taken the measures necessary to address them," Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said in a statement.

There you have it - another example of Bloomberg's fiscal genius (i.e., the stealing of public money for private gain) at work.

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.

Another Bloomberg Corruption Scandal

The Bloomberg scandals just keep mounting:

One of New York’s largest nonprofit job placement agencies falsely claimed to have helped find jobs for at least 1,400 people in less than two years, according to the city’s Department of Investigation.

The agency, Seedco, the investigative agency found, “developed systematic practices to report false placements” to the city’s Department of Small Business Services. In many hundreds of cases, Seedco, which is an important part of the Bloomberg administration’s ambitious efforts to find jobs for the unemployed, took a jobless client’s work history, altered dates and claimed past employment as a new job.

The investigative agency noted that the number of fraudulent claims could be much higher. For three years, from 2008 through February 2011, city officials “deemed it acceptable” for its nonprofit contractors to shred all job placement documents.

The New York Times, in two articles last summer, revealed these and other abuses after a former deputy director at a Seedco center, Bill Harper, provided 400 examples of false placements. Later, six former Seedco employees said managers had pressured them to produce thousands of fake job placements.

The Department of Investigation noted that Seedco responded by dismissing allegations of fraud as untrue and attacking the credibility of Mr. Harper. Even as agency officials took this public posture, investigators noted, senior staff members privately had unearthed an e-mail pointing to fraud.

Perhaps most confounding, city investigators discovered Seedco employees’ entering false job placements into its database as recently as last month.

...

The Bloomberg administration gives “performance-based” payments to nonprofit job contractors that produce high numbers of job placements. And at the time of the alleged fraudulent job placements, Seedco was competing to win a new multimillion-dollar contract to run a work force center in the Bronx.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has lauded Seedco and its work in meeting his administration’s aggressive job-seeking goals. Seedco, with a board that is a who’s who of nonprofit royalty in the city, now holds $22.2 million in contracts from the Department of Small Business Services. Seedco also holds welfare-to-work contracts with the city.

Will Bloomberg be held accountable for this scandal?

Will any city official be held accountable?

They should be:

The city’s investigation report raises a question of why city officials did not push harder for answers. It does not suggest any complicity by city officials.

But last August, when the deputy commissioner of small-business services, Angie Kamath, was asked about allegations of fraud at Seedco, she insisted at first that no investigation was needed. “We have internal closure,” she said.

She said that if Mr. Harper was “seriously concerned about the integrity of the data,” he should have come to the city rather than The Times.

Yeah, city officials really seemed like they were going to get right on that investigation.

And once again, it is Bloomberg's unrelenting push for ever-higher performance goals that brought about the fraud:

Seedco no longer allows managers to judge employees based on their ability to meet aggressive job placement targets. Seedco notes, too, that it does not profit from its job placement work.

That excuse understates the pressure on nonprofit groups when it comes to job placement. As the city’s investigation department notes, nonprofit groups, not the least Seedco, are engaged in a highly competitive race for new city contracts. In Seedco’s case, agency officials pressured workers to produce more and more fraudulent job placements even as the agency sought a large new contract to open a job center in the Bronx.

Relentless competition always brings out the best in all of us, doesn't it?

I'm sure when Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg get their way next year and start pitting teachers against each other on a big state-wide bell curve built from relentless test score-based performance goals, nothing like what happened at Seedco will happen in the school system.

Bloomberg Takes "Partial" Responsibility For CityTime Theft Of $600 Million

From NY 1

Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters today that he did not pay enough attention as about $600 million was allegedly stolen from CityTime, the city's automated payroll system.

So far, authorities have charged 11 people, including one corporation, in connection with the massive fraud involving CityTime, which was designed to cut down on payroll waste and abuse.

Speaking at the New York City Civic Corps graduation ceremony at Gracie Mansion today, the mayor said the system should have been monitored more carefully.

"Certainly nobody paid as much attention to it as they should have, from me on down, and we're going to find out who did what," said Bloomberg. "A lot of it is 'should have, would have and could have,' I think it's fair to say, and we should have watched it more carefully and hopefully we learn and don't make the same mistake again."

The CityTime scandal is one of the largest frauds against the city, rivaling the corruption under 19th century Mayor William "Boss" Tweed.

Bloomberg's taking "partial responsibility" for the CityTime scandal is like a woman being "partially pregnant."

The mayor either is responsible for the contracts his government has with private contractors and is in charge of oversight of said contracts or he's not.

My reading of city law is that the mayor is, indeed, in charge of those things (though the City Controller's office does play a role and former Controller Bill Thompson was woefully inadequate in that job.)

Nonetheless, the city was made aware of problems in the CityTime project as far back as 2005 and Bloomberg did nothing about it.

So for him to say that he is only partially responsible for this mess is just jive.

Given that the CityTime scandal, as NY1 duly notes, "is one of the largest frauds against the city, rivaling the corruption under 19th century William "Boss" Tweed," and given that $600 million has disappeared from the city coffers and into the pockets (and bank accounts) of crooks, Bloomberg's taking "partial responsibility" for the scandal is not good enough.

I should add that there are other scandals involving city contracts, outside consultants and a startling lack of city oversight that are being investigated as well.

CityTime is just the tip of the scandal is just the tip of the scandal iceberg for the Bloomberg administration.

When you look at the various DOE scandals involving the tech consultants and when the school construction contracts are investigated. you will see that Bloomberg's legacy as mayor of New York City will be analogous to Boss Tweed's legacy.

He bears full responsibility for these scandals.

The mayor loves to point the "accountability finger" at others, like teachers and principals in the NYC school system.

But when it comes to taking responsibility for his own government and it's lack of oversight of these outside consultant contracts, he is still refusing to say the buck stops with him.

Oh, Harry Truman, where are you now?

A victimized city turns its lonely eyes to you, whoo-whoo-whoo...

Bloomberg Refuses To Take Responsibility For CityTime Corruption

It's not his fault!!!!!!!!!

Mayor Bloomberg today insisted most of the problem with his scandal-scarred CityTime payroll project was cost over-runs – not corruption.

“The biggest expense was that they started out by underestimating the complexity and cost of the project and then, as they went along, kept adding things. That’s the biggest chunk,” Bloomberg said this morning on his radio show.

He added: “But there was an unconscionable amount of fraud.”

His comments seemed to reject allegations from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who blasted the CityTime project on Monday as “one of the largest and most brazen frauds ever committed against the City of New York.”

Bharara was, at the time, announcing yet another indictment of consultants connected with the computerized payroll project – Reddy and Padma Allen, a husband and wife who co-owned a subcontractor called TechnoDyne L.L.C. That brings the total number of indictments to 11 people and one company, TechnoDyne.

The indictment claims that “virtually the entirety of the more than $600 million that was paid to [the main contractor, Scientific Applications International Corporation] was tainted directly or indirectly by fraud.”

The scandal has tainted Bloomberg’s third term, but he has largely dismissed suggestions that he or his administration is at fault.

“The system is now up and working and it seems to be working,” Bloomberg said on the radio this morning. “There was an enormous amount of fraud. How much it really is, will be, and how much you can recover, you know, you won’t know.”

Wow - the Mayor of Accountability takes no accountability for the CityTime mess.

In fact, he doesn't even agree that it is a mess at all.

Sure, he acknowledges there was corruption and overruns that just couldn't be helped, but overall he thinks the project is just great.

Just great.

Talk about a lack of accountability.

Let's review.

The U.S. attorney said the following about the CityTime project:

The CityTime project was "corrupted to its core."

The fraud was "epic in magnitude, duration and scope."

$600 million dollars of the money the city paid for the project was either directly or indirectly tainted by the criminality.

This crime one of the "most brazen frauds ever committed against New York City."

That's what the U.S. attorney working on the case said about the matter.

11 people have been indicted in the scheme so far.

The U.S. attorney promises more indictments to come.

In Bloomberg's world, this is nothing to blink at.

You see, these were private consultants from the private sector, not unionized employees from the public sector, so really, what's the matter if the project goes nine years over the time it was supposed to be completed and increases from the original $63 million pricetag to somewhere over $700 million dollars?

So what if the consultants working on CityTime extended the project by years in order to steal $600 million dollars?

So what if the company hired to work on the technology project stole $400 million and had no other major clients (in fact, probably wouldn't have existed if not for the CityTime money)?

So what?

In the words of another great manager of government projects, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "Shit happens!"

Ah, but can you imagine if the $600 million dollars had been stolen by unionized and public employees?

Oy vey, Bloomberg would have been talking all the day long about how crooked the city employees are, what a disgrace the unions are, how everybody involved needs to go to jail, yadda yadda unions suck yadda...

Same goes for what the editorial boards at the tabloids - the Times, the Murdoch Street Journal, the Post and the News.

They NEVER would let this theft - the worst EVER committed against the City of New York - pass with nary a bad word about the crooks, the companies themselves that enabled this thievery or the system that so was so lacking in oversight that the crooks oversaw themselves.

And yet, because these are private consultants working for private companies, well, what can we do about it?

Shit happens, you know?

The double standard applied to this crime is emblematic of our times (as I noted in this earlier post here.)

But $600 million stolen dollars is STILL $600 million stolen dollars.

So here is what ought to happen in this case:

The mayor ought to be arrested himself for criminal negligence in this matter.

Certainly he ought to be called to account and made to publicly state how it was that the worst fraud in the history of New York City was committed on his watch and continued for years after a whistleblower alerted the city to the matter.

And he ought to NOT be allowed to lay off thousands of teachers and close senior centers and firehouses in order to save a few hundred million when he has not only allowed $600 million to be stolen by the private consultants but plans to spend another $900 million on private consultants and tech spending for the NYCDOE next year, a bonanza of corruption and fraud that should not be allowed to go forward without significant scrutiny by outside entities independent of the mayor.

The Mayor of Accountability needs to to be held accountable himself for the corruption in the CityTime case, as well as the DOE corruption that has already seen one outside consultant arrested for stealing $3.6 million and a top DOE official resign because the company she was overseeing was stealing money from the DOE (even as she was sleeping with one of the owners.)

And these are just the crimes that have been revealed so far under Bloomberg's watch.

Remember, Bloomberg doesn't have to give a lot of details about how he spends money in capital projects, so who knows how much money the crooked consultants are getting away with in the no-bid contracts they've been handed by Bloomberg.

It is time for Bloomberg to go.

Time to go, old man.

Bermuda is calling.

And so is Sing Sing.

Enough is enough.

CityTime Fraud Couldn't Have Happened Without Help From Inside City Hall

Al Jazeera has a really good video report on the CityTime scandal:



This is the biggest theft in NYC history - the crooks stole $600 million dollars.

Mayor Bloomberg shrugs over it all, says the money just "slipped through the cracks," and anyway, the project is working now and stopping future fraud by city employees sneaking off early from work, so Bloomberg is thrilled with the results.

And it only cost over $700 million dollars, $600 million of which was stolen!

Amazing.

Just amazing.

And the sad thing is, Bloomberg is getting away with this.

This scandal should tarnish his reputation the way Tea Pot Dome tarnished Harding.

And like the Tea Pot Dome scandal was just one scandal among many in the Harding administration, this one is just the tip of the iceberg for Bloomberg and his outside consultants and tech contracts.

The more they look into the outside consultant contracts handed out by the Bloomberg administration, the more fraud they will uncover.

At the NYCDOE, there are at least two other outside consultant/tech scandals (the Willard Lanham scandal and the Judith Hederman scandal.)

Yet somehow Bloomberg moves on, making believe he's some financial management genius.

Financial genius, my ass.

Warning Harding is more like it.

Bloomberg ought to be forced to resign in disgrace.

Instead, he's still governing like he's got a four million vote mandate.

He's slashing the budget and cutting programs for seniors and laying off thousands of teachers to save hundreds of millions of dollars while the crooked consultants rob the city blind.

It's time to go, old man.

Time to go.

Bermuda is calling.