Gerard Denault, CityTime Project Manager, Fired for Raiding the Till

The beleaguered lead contractor in the $800 million CityTime debacle has fired the project manager for paying himself for hours he didn’t even work, Comptroller John Liu reports.

Science Applications International Corp. tells the city that it has fired Gerard Denault, who was leading the company’s development of the effort to automate the city’s time card system. SAIC says it will return $2.4 million paid to Denault.

The project ballooned from an estimated $63 million to more than $800 million, sparking city investigations, the fraud indictment of eight people, and major embarrassment to the Bloomberg administration. The Voice reported on the scandal here.

Liu told reporters that SAIC determined that “Denault violated SAIC’s policies and 
standards with respect to timekeeping practices while working on CityTime. He routinely billed hours to the CityTime project that he did not in fact work.”

Until now, the investigation into CityTime had only implicated employees of the consulting firm, Spherion, and officials in the city’s Office of Payroll Administration. Denault’s firing brings responsibility for the catastrophe to the doorstep of one of the country’s most prominent security and technology firms.”

“The very company entrusted by our City to build a timekeeping system for NYC employees has grossly mismanaged their own time keeping, and in the process over charged the city for sums of money — still to be determined,” Liu said.



In a letter to Mayor Bloomberg, Liu called for deeper investigation of SAIC’s role in the scandal, and asked him to freeze further payments to SAIC pending the outcome of that investigation.