Johnny does business with overbiller

From the NY Post:

Comptroller John Liu has blasted a major city contractor for allegedly cheating taxpayers of $163 million — but that wasn’t enough to stop Liu’s office from quietly doing business with the same firm, The Post has learned.

Liu excoriated the Bloomberg administration last year for allowing overbilling in its $2 billion-plus contract with Hewlett-Packard for the massive 911 call center project, and he recently threatened to reject future contracts with the company — all while quietly inking his own deal with HP.

Two months after issuing a searing audit charging HP with $163 million in overbilling, Liu awarded the company a $550,000 no-bid contract for printing services.

“Odd that, for some reason, he does not put out a glossy press release every time he inks a no-bid contract with a company he publicly trashes,” said Bloomberg spokesman Marc La Vorgna, when told of the contract. “Typical of the daily hypocrisy you see coming out of that office.”

Liu’s spokeswoman, Eve Kessler, defended the comptroller’s contract.

“Why is this news? Of course, we have a contract with HP. Many city agencies do, which is how, as a city, we’re spending around $80 million a year with the company. That’s exactly what gives us leverage in calling for a boycott if HP doesn’t pay the $163 million it owes NYC taxpayers,” she said.

Liu’s 2012 audit of the 911 project, formerly known as the Emergency Communications Transformation Program, claimed outrageous examples of overbilling, including a software engineer who actually wrote “called to kill a waterbug” on his time sheet.

The comptroller concluded the 911 project is more than $1 billion over budget.