NYC BigTime CityTime Fraud Charges Ripples On | Hacker News Reader

NYC BigTime CityTime Fraud Charges Ripples On

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4 pointswglb4 comments

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 ?

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.

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.

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_...

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.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.62e273bb0ef1f...

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