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...