New York, NY – Bureaucrats at the New York City Housing Authority gave their new $36 million computerized rent-collection system the bizarre acronym NICE (NYCHA Improving Customer Experience).
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But for landlords and public housing tenants, the system — designed by firm Siebel-Oracle — is a cyber-monster run amok.
Since NICE was launched in February, the annual certification process for 100,000 tenants who receive Section 8 rent subsidies has turned into a hellhole of disappeared documents, erroneous payments and baseless eviction notices.
Many of the 30,000 private landlords who get paid by the Housing Authority are up fed up.
“It’s total chaos beyond belief,” said one Brooklyn building owner. “Landlords are being mixed up and getting wrong checks. Sometimes the computer automatically sends termination notices to every tenant in a building. Transfers get held up for months. The whole thing gets worse every day.”
In September, the Legal Aid Society filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of 30 tenants alleging NYCHA’s “system failure to comply with federal recertification requirements.”
But the madness doesn’t end with Section 8.
The new system is also handling new applications for public housing projects and all requests for tenant transfers.
“It’s so poorly designed that we have constant problems with the connections of our computers, records just disappear once they are scanned,” said a frustrated NYCHA manager. “It’s been almost a year and this thing is still a horror story.”
and we wanna trust the federal government was our health care
all nyc govt systems run like this.
There isn’t a computer system in the world that wasn’t designed, built and vetted by humans.
Sounds like every other city agency to me. The important thing to remember is that we have lots of bicycle lanes and pedestrian malls everywhere!
The problem is thata lot of things are now PAPERLESS!! Go prove something!! They do not have the backup!!
Today it’s the waste of $36 million on these Housing Authority computers; yesterday it was the waste or $7 million on the gps for fire and sanitation trucks; and please let’s not forget the CityTime payroll project that was originally estimated to cost $63 million but in fact has cost more than $600 million and ended up being one gigantic fraud.
And to make up for all the mistakes the government officials of this city have made we inhabitants end up getting taxed and fined into poverty.
Thank goodness we elected a billionaire businessman as mayor of our great city because he’s very shrewd and knows how to protect our city and taxpayers from getting the shaft.
Its Bloomberg times. Bureaucracy at its best.