When life gives you a billion-dollar boondoggle, use the settlement to make budget-saving lemonade! At least that appears to be Mayor Bloomberg's logic. Hizzoner is set to announce his executive budget proposal this morning, but yesterday he gave a little early taste and it's something of a surprise. In order to fill "an unexpected hole in the budget" the city is planning on using that half-billion CityTime settlement the city announced in March. See, there's a silver lining in the city getting swindled! more ›

Over the weekend we received an email from an AOL account, asking us to "FIND OUT THE TRUTH ALWAYS" with regard to our recent (and long-standing) coverage of billionaire Gristedes CEO John Catsimatidis. Turns out, the email was from THE MAN HIMSELF, who urged us to give him a call this morning. We spoke to Catsimatidis (who carries the same gun as James Bond) about whether he'll actually run for mayor, Stand Your Ground laws, and how, despite his outsized personality, he's really just a "plain vanilla person." more ›

With the CityTime scandal slowly being sorted out, Comptroller John Liu wouldn't want you to think that Mayor Bloomberg's administration wasn't finding other ways to hand over your tax dollars to overzealous, under-supervised contractors. Not when the city's already messy Emergency Communications Transformation Program (ECTP), meant to update our 911 system, continues to bleed money. Seriously, the project is now projected to be seven years late and a billion over budget. more ›

The $692 million CityTime scandal—arguably the biggest boondoggle of Mayor Bloomberg's three terms, even if most New Yorkers greeted it with a shrug—is starting to wrap up. Today the city and the U.S. Attorney's office announced that Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the main contractor in the $600 million-plus project, will pay over $500 million to resolve a federal criminal investigation into its conduct. Meanwhile the criminal charges in the case continue. more ›

Nine years after Science Applications International Corporation bled the city's coffers of $600 million for Mayor Bloomberg's timekeeping fiasco that no one seems to care about, the company has fired three executives linked to the project. In a letter obtained by the Daily News, SAIC's CEO wrote to employees yesterday, "The kind of behavior we have seen in CityTime is criminal and is an affront to everything SAIC stands for as a company." It's unclear whether he scribbled in the margins, "But we're still keeping the cash." more ›

Remember CityTime? It's Mayor Bloomberg's $740 million boondoggle to modernize the city's payroll administration that—oh look, Willow the cat! Anyway, it turns out that Bloomberg is really good at wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on implementing technological advances that years later appear to be abject failures. The Times reports that $363 million has been spent on Nycaps, a plan to "modernize" the personnel information on the city's employees that originally was budgeted for $66 million in 2002. That's right, $297 million spent over nine years for a website made in 1996. more ›

While we debate Hizzoner's white lies about the Goldsmith imbroglio, keep in mind there is a much pricier scandal that should make everyone thoroughly pissed. Back in June, Mayor Bloomberg finally admitted in a press conference that the $740 million CityTime disaster was in fact not a "pretty good job" as he'd previously stated, but a debacle that "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." However, three sources tell the Post that at least one city official did pay attention, and warned Bloomberg's advisors that CityTime was a huge waste of money, and should have been scrapped. more ›

Now that Bloomberg has politely asked for the city's $600 million back from the contractor involved in the CityTime fiasco (they said: maybe) and the government has seized $28.5 million in stolen funds from the defendants, US attorneys and the city's Department of Investigation are honing in on some of the city employees that made the scandal possible and oh so lucrative. "They want city officials," a source who's been questioned by authorities tells the Post, "They're brutal, the pressure they're putting on." more ›

Now that he's admitted the city messed up with the massive multi-million dollar fraud-hole that is the city's automated payroll system, CityTime, Mayor Bloomberg would like some of those millions back, please! Specifically, he wrote in a letter yesterday, he'd like $600 million back from the project's main contractor, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). more ›

Good news! The ringleader of the "epic," hilarious-if-it-wasn't-true "unprecedented fraud" that is the CityTime boondoggle has been made to forfeit $2.5 million in salary that he was paid as the lead contractor for Science Applications International Corp. Perhaps he was the one determining how much he should forfeit because, um, didn't he steal $5 million? Oh well, we'll take what we can get from a "pretty good job" like this one. Only $457.5 million left to recoup! more ›

We're aware from briefly scanning heavily redacted documents that Mayor Bloomberg's perception of money is somewhat different than most non-billionaires. But yesterday, just hours before the leader in the city's $740 million CityTime boondoggle was arrested for taking $5 million in kickbacks, Mayor Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program that "we actually did a pretty good job here, in retrospect." Sure, they may have overshot the projected $68 million it would cost, but…no, that pretty much sounds like the exact opposite of a "pretty good job" to us. more ›

The consultant in charge of the city's horrendously overbudget CityTime automated payroll project, the same man who couldn't keep track of his own hours, was arrested yesterday and charged this morning with taking at least $5 million in illegal kickbacks while on the project. His lawyer says he is not guilty and will be exonerated in court. Meanwhile, guess what? Mayor Bloomberg's people say that the CityTime system is "essentially" working! more ›

The CityTime scandal gets worse, if you can believe it. Yesterday Comptroller John Liu revealed that the private consultant in charge of the city's money-bleeding computerized timekeeping project was fired yesterday for—wait for it—not properly tracking his hours! Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the prime contractor on the project, says it will refund $2,470,522 to the city for the time $540,000-a-year senior project manager Gerard Denault billed to Gotham. more ›

CityTime, for example, is only doing 175,000 employees out of 300[,000], and we're ahead of schedule. We said it would be done by June, and last time I checked in two weeks ago, we're way ahead of schedule. more ›

The mess of a scandal that it is the city's bloated CityTime payroll project got more interesting yesterday as a new indictment was unsealed and one of the men charged in the scheme pled guilty in a bid for leniency. more ›

[Update below] Because CityTime worked out so well, our mayor has decided to try his hand at another massive attempt to streamline city infrastructure. IBM has just landed a $100 million, five-year NYC Citywide IT Infrastructure Services (CITIServ) contract. Meant to centralize and update data centers at 50 city agencies as well "provide better security and improve efficiency," the contract should, in layman's terms, take the city's servers "to the cloud." Just don't let this cloud rain where it shouldn't—OK Bloomberg? more ›

Oh guys, the CityTime mess is even worse than everybody thought! Beyond the whole "the project is massively over budget" issue and the "consultants stole $80 million from the project" problem a recently released audit from accounting firm KPMG now informs us that SAIC, the folks who have installed the $700 million payroll system, have made it is so complex, and left it so poorly documented, that the company they've essentially made it impossible for another operator to take over the finished product without SAIC first producing a whole slew of detailed instructions that currently do not exist. Or, in the words of Comptroller John Liu, "today we learned that it doesn’t even come with a user manual." more ›

Well, we guess this is good news. Remember how the city seems to have had $80 million stolen from its bloated $722 million dollar CityTime budget? While the theft continues to be one of the bigger scandals to hit the Bloomberg administration (snow or no) at least all of that cash doesn't appear to be gone for good. The city's Department of Investigation and the feds have already seized $26 million from bank accounts connected to the six defendants in the scheme. more ›

The Daily News continues to beat the drum of the relatively complex CityTime scandal currently bothering the Bloomberg administration. The latest development? Investigators are now looking at the main contractor for the project, Virginia-based Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), one of the biggest defense contractors around. more ›

The City Time scandal had already been a point of contention between the Bloomberg administration and City Comptroller John Liu, and now their fight has spread to the City's emergency services. Yesterday Liu's office rejected a $286 million contract request for the city's Emergency Communications Transformation Program, (ECTP), an effort to update the city's 911 system—a project that, incidentally, was initially budged at $380 million and has since ballooned to $666 million. more ›

Color us not surprised. A week after he was forced to take an unpaid suspension, Office of Payroll Administration Executive Director Joel Bondy—who was in charge of the whole CityTime mess—quit yesterday. Though so far there have been no charges that Bondy profited from the scheme to bilk the city out of $80 million his close and long-standing relationship with sketchy Mark Mazer, the alleged mastermind, was clearly a problem. more ›

We can now add kickbacks to the list of troubles to strike CityTime, the city's employee time keeping program whose budget went from $63 million to $722 million currently at the center of an $80 million dollar embezzlement scandal. And Mark Mazer, the alleged mastermind who helped fleece the program? Turns out he had a longer criminal history than previously reported. more ›

Bloomberg might be saying the CityTime scandal just "slipped through the cracks," but a 2003 letter from the then director of the city's Office of Payroll Administration certainly makes it sound like there was warning that something was going on. more ›

Would everybody just leave the government alone? Mayor Bloomberg sounded especially peeved at critics who maybe wanted to know how the city missed $80 million stolen in the elaborate CityTime scam. He said on his weekly radio show, "You can't look every place. I'm not trying to excuse it. It is something we certainly should focus on. On the other hand, if you want to know how big projects have big things that slip through the cracks, this is as good an example as you need." Must've been a mighty big crack. more ›

Fallout from Wednesday's revelations about just how bad the city's CityTime situation was—the $60 million project to streamline employee time keeping ballooned into a $722 million project, at least $80 million of which appears to have gone to crooked quality assurance contractors—has begun. Trying to make the most of a messy situation the city yesterday not only suspended an employee who should have stopped the debacle but also announced it had seized a big bag of cash from the crooks. more ›

Back in 2007, the city thought it could save $60 million by installing biometric scanners to keep track of employees' time (CityTime, they called it). But years later the city has spent $722 million extra because the project is, well, a huge mess of bloated salaries to consultants and overruns ("an endless money pit," Comptroller John Liu called it). And now an already embarrassing situation has gotten distinctly worse. Four consultants hired to run quality assurance have been accused of taking $80 million in "an elaborate fraud and kickback scheme" that involved faked time sheets (ha!) and a series of shell companies. According to the suit the suspected ringleader even got his mom and his wife in on the scheme! more ›

Seven years after it was supposed to be completed, CityTime has cost NYC $722 million more than its projected price, and still the city continues to sign fat checks to consultants for the now-notorious biometric timecard system. Mayor Blooomberg went so far as to call CityTime a “disaster,” city Comptroller John Liu labeled it a “money pit” and enraged Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James demanded an immediate investigation, according to the Daily News. "The city should get a partial refund because they were overbilled," she said. But it doesn't look like that will happen anytime soon. more ›