It’s “lucky” that there was massive fraud in the CityTime contract because the city ended up with a giant bargain, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.
The mayor said the entire embarrassing episode actually ended up saving taxpayers money to finance the new employee payroll system because the city recovered $525 million from the contractor, defense giant SAIC.
“That whole system cost us something like only $100 million, and it should have been many times that. We were lucky,” Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show, “because of the fraud.”
“In the end it turned out that because of the recovery that we saved a lot of money. And it certainly works,” he said.
But critics of the debacle were bewildered by Bloomberg’s reasoning.
“The heat must be getting to Mayor Bloomberg, who conveniently forgets that his gross mismanagement led to consultants ripping off taxpayers to the tune of a half-billion dollars just from CityTime, and millions more from other consultants,” said a spokeswoman for city Comptroller John Liu.
Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James called the mayor’s comment “outrageous and irresponsible.”