
NYC BigTime CityTime Fraud Charges Ripples On  - wglb
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/nyc-bigtime-citytime-fraud-charges-ripples-on
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tgflynn
I once developed a web based time card system for $3K.

I'm certainly not comparing that to a system for all of NYC but $60M
ballooning into $700M that's completely insane.

How can anyone imagine that the complexity of a time card system could
approach that of air-traffic control. Is this sort of thing due to the total
technical incompetence of our leadership ?

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elblanco
I did a research case-study on this project and the FBI system as part of a
study on enterprise architecture failures. The principal purpose of the
CityTime system was to prevent city employees from filling out and signing
time cards for their coworkers. In other words, reduce fraud in the time
keeping system and thereby lower city costs (payroll is one of, if not _the_ ,
biggest expense for the city government).

Outside of the fantastic irony of the situation, that requirement was
interpreted to mean a fairly high level of security and auditing over the city
employees' time keeping activities. This meant system integrated biometric
scanners, one-time keys, end-to-end encryption etc...making for a
fantastically complicated architecture.

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tgflynn
Thanks for the information. But I can't see how even those technologies could
begin to justify even the initial price (unless they were trying to develop
their own biometrics systems from scratch, which I don't think is necessary
given today's state-of-the-art).

My guess is that the biggest risk in trying to develop such a system is making
something that's completely impractical for the end user.

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elblanco
Oh, I agree. Even the original bid price seems outrageous to me. However, one
thing to keep in mind is that the city government of NYC is _massive_.
Something like a bit over a quarter of a million employees working in
everything from teaching to subway track maintenance, with a budget of $50
billion/yr. Just stopping the fraud issue with the time and attendance system
would have saved the original cost of the system!

One side-issue that's caused some of the bloat was the various city-employee
unions fighting against biometric scanners for time-in/time-out logging.

Here's some of the sources I used in my study (note the great discussion
_here_ on the same topic a while ago):

[https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/03/26/2010-03-26_city_...](https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/03/26/2010-03-26_city_pours_722m_down_consulting_contracts_black_hole.html)

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/nyregion/23scanning.html>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221068>

<http://www.nyc.gov/html/opa/html/about/city_time.shtml>

[http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/26/juan_gonzalez_ny_pays_...](http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/26/juan_gonzalez_ny_pays_230_consultants)

[http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.62e273bb0ef1f...](http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.62e273bb0ef1f307a62fa24601c789a0/)

