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I know hating on Oracle is en vogue, but I struggle to believe this $600M figure. a. I use to work in this space, even a $6M deal would be massive (let alone s

I know hating on Oracle is en vogue, but I struggle to believe this $600M figure. a. I use to work in this space, even a $6M deal would be massive (let alone something 100x bigger). b. The ENTIRE cuny budget in 2013 was only $2B [0]. This isn't their IT budget, this is literally the entire budget to run the entire university system across multiple campus, faculty, buildings, etc. c. Because Higher Ed is known to be so cheap, especially in the late 00s - big tech companies charged accordingly (which was at a massive discount relative to most other accounts). d. even if this $600M figure was an aggregated figure over multiple years, staffing and auxiliary costs - it still wouldn't come close to this figure. e. an expenditure this large would definitely be called out in CUNY annual financial reports, and I can't seem to find any reference to it. [0] https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/media-assets/fy2014-state-adopted-budget.pdf https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/media-assets... --- EDIT: I did find reference last year to a $175M funding request to migrate from on-prem PeopleSoft (Oracle) to cloud. Though, what I've historically seen is that only 10-20% of the funding request actually go to the software vendor. Organizations typically add 3-5x additional to either "pad" their request (in the event it doesn't get 'fully funded') and/or this is an opportunity for the university to higher for a bunch of roles they wouldn't have been able to get funded in the first place - so lots of things get buried in these numbers. Lastly, the figures are also typically multi-year. Like 5-years being asked up front for approval. Said differently, it wouln't surprise me if the true annual migration cost from onprem to cloud PeopleSoft might only be $10-20M https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/about/administration/offices/budget-and-finance/Budget_Request_FY2023_FINAL_web_lr.pdf https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/...

jeffwask 2y ago
My first thought was for $800 million you could found your own startup to write an HRMS and have enough left over for a fleet of super cars.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Well, San Francisco tried that for $40m and all they ended up with is a system that doesn't work and an Indian contractor that they made rich.
  - rlt 2y ago
    Sounds like poorly aligned incentives.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      SF's watchword is "MORE FUNDING". Money is like violence: if it isn't working, you aren't using enough.
      - lesuorac 2y ago
        That's kinda the only lever a lot of government has. If you don't build out a bunch of civil positions then you can only solve problems by throwing money at ideally somebody who can.
        renewiltord 2y ago
        That's my dream. One day I hope to recommend someone spend more money on me because I suck at what I do. So long as it's not their money, they should be quite willing.
  - p_l 2y ago
    If they paid WITCH company to realise it...well, they got what they paid for
- efitz 2y ago
  With government bureaucrats with no penalty for failure and no expertise in software development guiding the design? And “lowest bidder” contractors to implement whatever shitty design the bureaucrats came up with? Hahaha recipe for failure.
- mhuffman 2y ago
  I once submitted an RFP response for what was literally a CRUD app for a government agency. Medium-ish (to me) traffic. Needed to be rock-solid. Needed to be developed to spec, hosted, and supported (including tech support) for 5 years. I bid a little over $2million (I personally would have made about $500k of that). After a bit, the RFP was withdrawn and given to a sole-source provider for $100million, with the excuse that it was so complicated (HN would laugh at this if you saw the spec) that only one company could do it. So, that company gets it. Outsources everything to contractors in Pakistan. Site is constantly glitchy. And this next part is not a lie (and was def. not part of the spec) -- it only worked during business hours (m-f, 8am-5pm)! However the users of the site had to do work every day due to legal deadline requirements. They just had to set on the data until the next workday morning. I suspect that the provider spent about $1million or less for the entire contract and just kept the rest. So that is how govt. contracts can go.
throwaway63467 2y ago
Yeah seems like 50-100 % administrative overhead for each employee, hard to believe that someone would accept that, you could probably pay each employee a personal valet for that.
- matwood 2y ago
  50% overhead is pretty common for academic institutions. For example, indirect costs for an awarded grant are often 50%+. And yes, it's ridiculous.
  - pphysch 2y ago
    I've heard some of the national labs have 100-200% overhead for some grants
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
This is absolutely right - the education space is absolutely stingy and will balk at far lesser amounts; so the $600M seems difficult to believe.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Plus one on this. I've almost never seen a 9 figure deal in my life, and the only ones I've seen are massive core infra level deals by mega-corps. I absolutely cannot imagine CUNY spending more than most F50s spend on HRMs. Edit: I did some digging into the Tender [0] and it looks like it was $300M total across all 25 universities and colleges in the CUNY system along with the CUNY administrative portion itself and it was a full bundle of HRM, ERP, On-Prem Compute Resources, and headcount (PS and internal) over a 10 year period, so $30M per year across all 26 institutions. This came out to around $1.25M ACV per organization (10 year contract, 26 organizations). In reality, some of the larger colleges (eg. CCNY) will have spent much more than the smaller ones (eg. Bronx CC). In addition, each of the large CUNY colleges had budgets in the $150M range in the early 2010s [1] along with a separate $2B budget for CUNY's central organization (as mentioned above) What seems to have happened is the above page treated overall TCV as part of a single budget, when in reality, each individual constituent org with it's own budget spent out of their own pocket for ERP, HRM, Headcounr (PS and internal), and Compute (on-prem) This isn't egregious for the size of organizations that each of the constituent colleges and CCs in CUNY are. The big question is, if you used the PSC's (imo flawed) methodology, what would it give for CSUs, UCs, and SUNY (all of whom have a similar structure and student size). I'd expect a similar amount. [0] - https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/about/administration/offices/fpcm/departments/capital-budget/construction-fund/CUCF_April25_2018_AgendaResolution.pdf https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/... [1] - https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/finance/upload/FY-2013-Budget-Presented-to-Faculty-Nov-2013.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOoqcE_rtShQzOgkGHm6LBK053qQs_Oqzd6NP1syHfpCeSd4oXxBI https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/finance/upload...
  - phs318u 2y ago
    This should be the top reply. Thanks for digging into it.
echelon 2y ago
[deleted]
- hyperpape 2y ago
  This is not a particularly useful contribution. Source 1: Only mentions anonymous sources. And while I would put partial weight on that coming from an actual journalist, this is the same professor who wrote the original blogpost. Source 2: Same publication as Source 1, though I don't see a byline. No named sources. Source 3: No named sources. The "About Us" features Lorem Ipsum and four photos of the same woman. Source 4: A reddit post, no sources, and the amount quoted is not $600 million, but $250 million. Source 5: A petition. References an Oracle press release that didn't show up in your Google search (most likely because it doesn't exist, or it would be widely cited).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
tootie 2y ago
I'm reminded of the Oregon state health care exchange fiasco where Oracle took like $250M and never delivered a working product. Ended up in a lawsuit and a settlement.
- hyperpape 2y ago
  It was also reported by much more reliable sources, and was a statewide project.
koolba 2y ago
> Organizations typically add 3-5x additional to either "pad" their request (in the event it doesn't get 'fully funded') and/or this is an opportunity for the university to higher for a bunch of roles they wouldn't have been able to get funded in the first place - so lots of things get buried in these numbers. A factor of 3-5x seems insanely overboard. Thats arguably fraudulent. Ditto for claiming the money is for one thing and then using it for something entirely different. I get that it’s a communist era style scraping to get by / work around a broken budgetary system life in academia, but that’s misappropriation of tax and tuition dollars.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  You ask for 5x the need, get 2x the original amount, and then when the project costs 1.9x as much as expected you're still slightly under budget!
- screye 2y ago
  Reminds me of an anecdote about a lead engineer for metro rail projects in India. The lead engineer has over-designed the infrastructure by 3x over the standard. The junior engineer thought he was incompetent. Turns out, he's paid the big bucks to add affordances as counterbalance for corners cut due to corruption in every step of the production line.
etempleton 2y ago
I cannot imagine any college paying 600 million for such a thing. I suspect the writer is very much mistaken on the price and a bit paranoid on the College's motives. Perhaps it is 600 million over 10+ years. Why they would ever go with Oracle is another mystery as there are a number of vendors who specialize in this type of software for colleges (some of it good, most of it bad), so it would be foolish to explore a solution from Oracle that needs such a high level of customization to fit the needs of a University.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  These kinds of mysteries usually have a frustrating and mundane answer. The people with the power to make the decision: - were incompetent and just went with a big name, or - made the decision due to salespeople (social pressure and/or gifts), or - had interests that did not align with the org (ex. resume padding) But who knows, maybe there's a good reason they went with Oracle.
  - etempleton 2y ago
    You are likely correct. My best guess is they hired someone in IT from outside of higher education that had extensive experience with Oracle and had deployed it successfully in the past and so it was always going to be Oracle even though it was a poor fit.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  We don't know the true scope of this, but apparently $600m was low balling in this story: >The negotiations that were the run-up to the purchase of CUNYFirst were a travesty. The project required an expenditure of up to a billion dollars to do it right. CUNY Central offered far less. All but one of the bidders dropped out as a result: the project could not be done properly with what CUNY offered. Oracle-PeopleSoft did not drop out. However they warned CUNY that for that level of funding, they could not, would not CUSTOMIZE: they would only CONFIGURE. I do agree that it sounds like this was some 10+ year project with heaps of support. If this account it true, they went with Oracle because they were the cheapest (and were fine with the compromise of no configuration to hit that goal). If that hunch is true, I can see some $600k-$1m/year average for support of an entire chain of universities (remember that CUNY is a systetem of 10 colleges and more CC's like a UC, not just one campus) being peanuts that no one wanted to touch. Seems they got what they paid for: >The actual cost far exceeds the $600 million dollars that go to Oracle. Because processes are now much more inefficient, more people have to be hired to do tasks that were formerly automated. > - The interface is laughable: It looks like an early-90s update of 3270 bi-synch technology. Web 2.0? Ha. Not even Web 1.0. > - Because CUNY wouldn't pay for customization, we had to renumber our courses. This is just one of many, less visible to faculty, changes that CUNYFirst has forced. absolutely not surprising as someone who's used Peoplesoft. That stuff felt ancient even in 2003. to sign onto that 10 years afterwards for a very stagnant software is just insanity. ----- now of course I'm taking this at face value. It could be exaggerated or from a biased source. But in my biased opinion, who in the last 15 years isn't biased against Oracle's software? they will probably literally die out as their clients age out of the job market.
throwaway743 2y ago
Having worked for NY gov agencies for 7+ years, it's not that hard to believe really. Vendors overcharge crazy amounts all the time and get away with it without the gov client batting an eye. Experienced it first hand where I was on several projects where I did, without exaggeration, 95% of the work and my employer at the time charged $500,000 for one project and for another $750,000 in a single fiscal year. Sure, it wasn't $600 million (seems like that $600 million to Oracle had to of been spread out too), but the work was simply formatting their website content from an old template in their busted CMS (pretty sure it was some ancient HP CMS) in HTML and had to write some minor CSS and some minor JS. I ended up automating it locally and then the rest of the time was spent copying and pasting through this convoluted process due to having to connect to their outdated locked down remote desktop with a super slow connection. Additionally, I was only being paid under 6 figures at the time and it took much less time than they were quoted for, though my employer sat on their hands to make it seem like it took that much time. But yeah what the agencies were charged was unjustified irl... but on paper it was, they didn't push back on it or anything, and the cost of completing the projects was wayyy the hell less than what my employer at the time quoted them for. My assumption is they dont push back due to budgets not rolling over and wanting to maintain/increase their dept's annual budget. So it's not surprising they'd throw away that amount over the course of some years.
thisisit 2y ago
I agree. The $600M number seems way too much. >Though, what I've historically seen is that only 10-20% of the funding request actually go to the software vendor. Organizations typically add 3-5x additional to either "pad" their request (in the event it doesn't get 'fully funded') and/or this is an opportunity for the university to higher for a bunch of roles they wouldn't have been able to get funded in the first place - so lots of things get buried in these numbers. As someone working on implementing an Oracle solution for a large bureaucratic MNC this is also true. The padding often is 3x-5x with 5 year run rate the funding asks can be crazy. For people who are just looking at numbers it can seem crazy. But for anyone who is implementing it or renewing contracts they know the real numbers. The migration costs though might be higher than $10-20M. Contractor costs can be crazy too. Sometimes costing multiples of the software costs. In my current practice I do notice that the vendors - both software and third party implementation partners - have a chummy relationship with a decision maker. This creates a lot of misaligned incentives when it comes to "company's" money.
Spooky23 2y ago
All things are possible. Here’s a scandal where the NYC government spent $700M to implement a time card system. CUNY has access to public authorities like the research foundation, which may fund stuff in addition to their appropriations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityTime_payroll_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityTime_payroll_scandal If you go to openbookny, a contract website run by the NYS Comptroller, CUNY has a $800M Oracle contract that has dispersed $630M.
- jer0me 2y ago
  This one for $800 thousand? https://wwe2.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contracttransactions.cfm?Contract=CNY01-N101202-3330221 https://wwe2.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contract...
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Whoops. Mea culpa! That’s what I get for quick takes on a bus.

jeffwask 2y ago

My first thought was for $800 million you could found your own startup to write an HRMS and have enough left over for a fleet of super cars.

renewiltord 2y ago
Well, San Francisco tried that for $40m and all they ended up with is a system that doesn't work and an Indian contractor that they made rich.
- rlt 2y ago
  Sounds like poorly aligned incentives.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    SF's watchword is "MORE FUNDING". Money is like violence: if it isn't working, you aren't using enough.
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      That's kinda the only lever a lot of government has. If you don't build out a bunch of civil positions then you can only solve problems by throwing money at ideally somebody who can.
      - renewiltord 2y ago
        That's my dream. One day I hope to recommend someone spend more money on me because I suck at what I do. So long as it's not their money, they should be quite willing.
- p_l 2y ago
  If they paid WITCH company to realise it...well, they got what they paid for
efitz 2y ago
With government bureaucrats with no penalty for failure and no expertise in software development guiding the design? And “lowest bidder” contractors to implement whatever shitty design the bureaucrats came up with? Hahaha recipe for failure.
mhuffman 2y ago
I once submitted an RFP response for what was literally a CRUD app for a government agency. Medium-ish (to me) traffic. Needed to be rock-solid. Needed to be developed to spec, hosted, and supported (including tech support) for 5 years. I bid a little over $2million (I personally would have made about $500k of that). After a bit, the RFP was withdrawn and given to a sole-source provider for $100million, with the excuse that it was so complicated (HN would laugh at this if you saw the spec) that only one company could do it. So, that company gets it. Outsources everything to contractors in Pakistan. Site is constantly glitchy. And this next part is not a lie (and was def. not part of the spec) -- it only worked during business hours (m-f, 8am-5pm)! However the users of the site had to do work every day due to legal deadline requirements. They just had to set on the data until the next workday morning. I suspect that the provider spent about $1million or less for the entire contract and just kept the rest. So that is how govt. contracts can go.

throwaway63467 2y ago

Yeah seems like 50-100 % administrative overhead for each employee, hard to believe that someone would accept that, you could probably pay each employee a personal valet for that.

matwood 2y ago
50% overhead is pretty common for academic institutions. For example, indirect costs for an awarded grant are often 50%+. And yes, it's ridiculous.
- pphysch 2y ago
  I've heard some of the national labs have 100-200% overhead for some grants
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

supriyo-biswas 2y ago

This is absolutely right - the education space is absolutely stingy and will balk at far lesser amounts; so the $600M seems difficult to believe.

alephnerd 2y ago
Plus one on this. I've almost never seen a 9 figure deal in my life, and the only ones I've seen are massive core infra level deals by mega-corps. I absolutely cannot imagine CUNY spending more than most F50s spend on HRMs. Edit: I did some digging into the Tender [0] and it looks like it was $300M total across all 25 universities and colleges in the CUNY system along with the CUNY administrative portion itself and it was a full bundle of HRM, ERP, On-Prem Compute Resources, and headcount (PS and internal) over a 10 year period, so $30M per year across all 26 institutions. This came out to around $1.25M ACV per organization (10 year contract, 26 organizations). In reality, some of the larger colleges (eg. CCNY) will have spent much more than the smaller ones (eg. Bronx CC). In addition, each of the large CUNY colleges had budgets in the $150M range in the early 2010s [1] along with a separate $2B budget for CUNY's central organization (as mentioned above) What seems to have happened is the above page treated overall TCV as part of a single budget, when in reality, each individual constituent org with it's own budget spent out of their own pocket for ERP, HRM, Headcounr (PS and internal), and Compute (on-prem) This isn't egregious for the size of organizations that each of the constituent colleges and CCs in CUNY are. The big question is, if you used the PSC's (imo flawed) methodology, what would it give for CSUs, UCs, and SUNY (all of whom have a similar structure and student size). I'd expect a similar amount. [0] - https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/about/administration/offices/fpcm/departments/capital-budget/construction-fund/CUCF_April25_2018_AgendaResolution.pdf https://www.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/page-assets/... [1] - https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/finance/upload/FY-2013-Budget-Presented-to-Faculty-Nov-2013.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOoqcE_rtShQzOgkGHm6LBK053qQs_Oqzd6NP1syHfpCeSd4oXxBI https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/finance/upload...
- phs318u 2y ago
  This should be the top reply. Thanks for digging into it.

echelon 2y ago

[deleted]

hyperpape 2y ago
This is not a particularly useful contribution. Source 1: Only mentions anonymous sources. And while I would put partial weight on that coming from an actual journalist, this is the same professor who wrote the original blogpost. Source 2: Same publication as Source 1, though I don't see a byline. No named sources. Source 3: No named sources. The "About Us" features Lorem Ipsum and four photos of the same woman. Source 4: A reddit post, no sources, and the amount quoted is not $600 million, but $250 million. Source 5: A petition. References an Oracle press release that didn't show up in your Google search (most likely because it doesn't exist, or it would be widely cited).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

tootie 2y ago

I'm reminded of the Oregon state health care exchange fiasco where Oracle took like $250M and never delivered a working product. Ended up in a lawsuit and a settlement.

hyperpape 2y ago
It was also reported by much more reliable sources, and was a statewide project.

koolba 2y ago

> Organizations typically add 3-5x additional to either "pad" their request (in the event it doesn't get 'fully funded') and/or this is an opportunity for the university to higher for a bunch of roles they wouldn't have been able to get funded in the first place - so lots of things get buried in these numbers. A factor of 3-5x seems insanely overboard. Thats arguably fraudulent. Ditto for claiming the money is for one thing and then using it for something entirely different. I get that it’s a communist era style scraping to get by / work around a broken budgetary system life in academia, but that’s misappropriation of tax and tuition dollars.

datadrivenangel 2y ago
You ask for 5x the need, get 2x the original amount, and then when the project costs 1.9x as much as expected you're still slightly under budget!
screye 2y ago
Reminds me of an anecdote about a lead engineer for metro rail projects in India. The lead engineer has over-designed the infrastructure by 3x over the standard. The junior engineer thought he was incompetent. Turns out, he's paid the big bucks to add affordances as counterbalance for corners cut due to corruption in every step of the production line.

etempleton 2y ago

I cannot imagine any college paying 600 million for such a thing. I suspect the writer is very much mistaken on the price and a bit paranoid on the College's motives. Perhaps it is 600 million over 10+ years. Why they would ever go with Oracle is another mystery as there are a number of vendors who specialize in this type of software for colleges (some of it good, most of it bad), so it would be foolish to explore a solution from Oracle that needs such a high level of customization to fit the needs of a University.

Vegenoid 2y ago
These kinds of mysteries usually have a frustrating and mundane answer. The people with the power to make the decision: - were incompetent and just went with a big name, or - made the decision due to salespeople (social pressure and/or gifts), or - had interests that did not align with the org (ex. resume padding) But who knows, maybe there's a good reason they went with Oracle.
- etempleton 2y ago
  You are likely correct. My best guess is they hired someone in IT from outside of higher education that had extensive experience with Oracle and had deployed it successfully in the past and so it was always going to be Oracle even though it was a poor fit.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
We don't know the true scope of this, but apparently $600m was low balling in this story: >The negotiations that were the run-up to the purchase of CUNYFirst were a travesty. The project required an expenditure of up to a billion dollars to do it right. CUNY Central offered far less. All but one of the bidders dropped out as a result: the project could not be done properly with what CUNY offered. Oracle-PeopleSoft did not drop out. However they warned CUNY that for that level of funding, they could not, would not CUSTOMIZE: they would only CONFIGURE. I do agree that it sounds like this was some 10+ year project with heaps of support. If this account it true, they went with Oracle because they were the cheapest (and were fine with the compromise of no configuration to hit that goal). If that hunch is true, I can see some $600k-$1m/year average for support of an entire chain of universities (remember that CUNY is a systetem of 10 colleges and more CC's like a UC, not just one campus) being peanuts that no one wanted to touch. Seems they got what they paid for: >The actual cost far exceeds the $600 million dollars that go to Oracle. Because processes are now much more inefficient, more people have to be hired to do tasks that were formerly automated. > - The interface is laughable: It looks like an early-90s update of 3270 bi-synch technology. Web 2.0? Ha. Not even Web 1.0. > - Because CUNY wouldn't pay for customization, we had to renumber our courses. This is just one of many, less visible to faculty, changes that CUNYFirst has forced. absolutely not surprising as someone who's used Peoplesoft. That stuff felt ancient even in 2003. to sign onto that 10 years afterwards for a very stagnant software is just insanity. ----- now of course I'm taking this at face value. It could be exaggerated or from a biased source. But in my biased opinion, who in the last 15 years isn't biased against Oracle's software? they will probably literally die out as their clients age out of the job market.

throwaway743 2y ago

Having worked for NY gov agencies for 7+ years, it's not that hard to believe really. Vendors overcharge crazy amounts all the time and get away with it without the gov client batting an eye. Experienced it first hand where I was on several projects where I did, without exaggeration, 95% of the work and my employer at the time charged $500,000 for one project and for another $750,000 in a single fiscal year. Sure, it wasn't $600 million (seems like that $600 million to Oracle had to of been spread out too), but the work was simply formatting their website content from an old template in their busted CMS (pretty sure it was some ancient HP CMS) in HTML and had to write some minor CSS and some minor JS. I ended up automating it locally and then the rest of the time was spent copying and pasting through this convoluted process due to having to connect to their outdated locked down remote desktop with a super slow connection. Additionally, I was only being paid under 6 figures at the time and it took much less time than they were quoted for, though my employer sat on their hands to make it seem like it took that much time. But yeah what the agencies were charged was unjustified irl... but on paper it was, they didn't push back on it or anything, and the cost of completing the projects was wayyy the hell less than what my employer at the time quoted them for. My assumption is they dont push back due to budgets not rolling over and wanting to maintain/increase their dept's annual budget. So it's not surprising they'd throw away that amount over the course of some years.

thisisit 2y ago

I agree. The $600M number seems way too much. >Though, what I've historically seen is that only 10-20% of the funding request actually go to the software vendor. Organizations typically add 3-5x additional to either "pad" their request (in the event it doesn't get 'fully funded') and/or this is an opportunity for the university to higher for a bunch of roles they wouldn't have been able to get funded in the first place - so lots of things get buried in these numbers. As someone working on implementing an Oracle solution for a large bureaucratic MNC this is also true. The padding often is 3x-5x with 5 year run rate the funding asks can be crazy. For people who are just looking at numbers it can seem crazy. But for anyone who is implementing it or renewing contracts they know the real numbers. The migration costs though might be higher than $10-20M. Contractor costs can be crazy too. Sometimes costing multiples of the software costs. In my current practice I do notice that the vendors - both software and third party implementation partners - have a chummy relationship with a decision maker. This creates a lot of misaligned incentives when it comes to "company's" money.

Spooky23 2y ago

All things are possible. Here’s a scandal where the NYC government spent $700M to implement a time card system. CUNY has access to public authorities like the research foundation, which may fund stuff in addition to their appropriations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityTime_payroll_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityTime_payroll_scandal If you go to openbookny, a contract website run by the NYS Comptroller, CUNY has a $800M Oracle contract that has dispersed $630M.

jer0me 2y ago
This one for $800 thousand? https://wwe2.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contracttransactions.cfm?Contract=CNY01-N101202-3330221 https://wwe2.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contract...
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Whoops. Mea culpa! That’s what I get for quick takes on a bus.