A High Tech Government Fiasco

Reason got the story, reported officially here. This is typical government corruption on a massive scale. The thief in this case is SAIC, a defense contractor. No municipality should ever hire a contractor who has done business with the Pentagon.

The CityTime system - assuming that it is finally completed - will cover 140,000 city workers who, instead of filling out paper timesheets, will need to scan their hands into a biometric reader to record their comings and goings. The system currently covers 45,000 employees, 19,000 of whom must use it to clock in and out each day and during their lunch hours. City workers earning more than $68,000 don't have to use the palm scanners, which makes the New York City unions angry.

The project was initiated in 1998 at an estimated cost of $68 million.... This 2008 CityLimits article says the project contract, which I assume includes system maintenance, could run to 2021.

The current estimated cost to complete is now placed at a whopping $722 million, with some $670 million of that going to the defense contractor SAIC for the system's development. According to this article in the New York Daily News, most of the remaining tens of millions have been spent on outside contract and project management to control the project's cost and quality.

I know this is corruption because the same service can be run on my five year old computer using a high school kid and web technology. To put this in perspective, NYC was able to add congestion pricing on part of the bridge tolls. They spend about a million on a few intersections and probably saved more in gasoline than money lost to the crooks in this case.

California used to have this corruption scam, every three years paying off Lockheed to pretend to automate the DMV here. Each time, the state got vu grafs and othing else. Lockheed would get a hundred million. That was ten years ago, and the same rule applied then, a high school kid and web technology. So you can imagine the amount of high tech corruption will be in Pelosi's garbage about computerizing medical records.

The problem are defense contractors, they are simply thieves, there is no other word for them. This is why I worry about Raytheon being involved in intelligent transportation projects. So I watch the system that Raytheon is installing in the Washington beltway.

Cities would be advised to read my blog, seriously, I can spot these crooks.