Bloomberg Suspends Head of City Payroll Amid CityTime Troubles
Saturday, December 18, 2010
The head of the office that oversees New York City's troubled CityTime payroll system has been shown the door. Joel Bondy, executive director of the city's Office of Payroll Administration, was suspended without pay on Wednesday, according to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office.
On Wednesday, four of the project's consultants and two of their relatives were indicted on charges of defrauding the city of $80 million in connection with CityTime, a software system that was supposed to keep track of city employees' hours.
Speaking on his weekly radio show on WOR on Friday, the mayor said the city should have detected the fraud earlier. But he added that the CityTime project involved many layers of contracts, and was difficult to police. Still, he expects the city to get the money back. "Rose Gill Hearn, our commissioner of the Department of Investigations, thinks that we'll recover virtually all the money," he said. But it certainly doesn't recover our reputation."
Bloomberg has put Stephen Goldsmith, the city's Deputy Mayor for Operations, in charge of the payroll system.
City Councilwoman Leticia James, who held hearings on the system last year, said it's time to scrap the project. She proposes that the city modernize its payroll system using in-house employees, instead of outside contractors. "The reality is is that we should look at all of these private consultant contracts in the city of New York. We should not privatize municipal work, particularly at these challenging times. We should better use municipal workers and employees and avert all of the layoffs," she said.
Carol Kellerman, the head of the Citizens Budget Commission, said the problems came when the city began to hire outside contractors to oversee other outside contractors. "You definitely need people inside the government to monitor the contracts to assure that basic performance metrics are being met, that there are benchmarks of performance, and to really kind of go out there and watch what's happening," she said. She said it's akin to taking your car to a mechanic you don't know.
The city has spent more than $630 million on CityTime, which was supposed to cost just $63 million.
Comments [1]
He keeps hiring hiring freaking consultants to write useless programs that no one wants or contributes to. Cronyism and corruption. I fight with three separate programs daily that do not speak to each other or even work well. They were not written by city employees who know the systems. A complete overhaul is necessary. I know I work for the city.
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