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The city may be up to its eyeballs in bureaucracy, but some departments are looking their bills over carefully. So carefully that they have charged five contractors for running for over $5,000 in unauthorized long distance calls to Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama and Florida from city offices in the Bronx. One contractor had been calling his mother in the D.R. The men were working for a company that was installing telephone and computer lines for a Board of Elections office. BoE employees were suspicious when phone bills were much higher than usual. The city's Department of Investigation Commissioner Rose Gil Hearn says, " "Keeping in touch with friends and family is important but these defendants shouldn't expect the taxpayers to pay for these telephone calls." No, us taxpayers will just pay for other stupid stuff.
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call me crazy, but why is it that when you call the D.R. you get busted but when you call, say Boston, it's just white collar "crime" that get written off like when you take pencils home. Not that I take pencils home. . .or call Boston for that matter, it was just the white-est place I could think of!
to clear up any misconceptions, in city offices you have to dial a long distance code (each unique and assigned by the City's technology department) just to get out. Then you get a bill, every month, listing all of your calls. You're supposed to mark the personal ones, add tax, and pay it.
So maybe the BOE stupidly gave these contractors a dial-out code, but in my opinion, whichever employee had been assigned that code should be responsible.
The City's actually pretty good about getting every penny out of their employees they can. It's not like we're lavished with perks. In addition to my monthly phone bills, if I lose my pager, I have pay to replace it. That never happened to me in the private sector. I even had to PAY a fee out of my first paycheck just to process my new employee information. Then I had to pay again for them to run a background check on me and take my fingerprints.
There are plenty of bozos working for the city but don't think there aren't safeguards in place and at least a desire on the part of the city to protect taxpayer dollars.