City Authorized $13M in Payments to Charged Contractor

LL's been eyeballing city purchase orders this afternoon, trying to suss out some more information about Sushil Bansal (pictured), arrested in connection to the OCTO corruption probe, and his company, Advanced Integrated Technologies Corp. (AITC).

Long story short, they've done a lot of business with the city.

According to publicly downloadable city records—thanks, Vivek!—the city has authorized more than 160 payments to AITC since 2004 totaling over $13 million. That's quite a bit more city business than the $350,000 reported by WTOP earlier.

Most of those purchase orders—more than $10 million worth—were submitted by OCTO; in addition, the Department of Motor Vehicles submitted $1.1 million (AITC had done work on DMV's Destiny computer system), and the transportation department submitted a $97,500 contract in 2005. About $1.7 million in payments were authorized for "equipment leases." (Note that just because the payments have been authorized doesn't mean they've thus far been paid in full; work could still be underway or yet to start or the contracts could have been modified.)

AITC's city earnings have been steadily on the rise. In 2004, the District submitted $612,058 in purchase orders to be paid to the company. In 2005, that figure rose to $1,583,888, and in 2006, rose still further to $2,799,426. In March 2007, Vivek Kundra took the reins at OCTO; AITC billings stayed fairly level that year, at $2,824,191. In 2008, however, AITC's city business nearly doubled, to $5,062,096. So far in 2009, city agencies have submitted three contracts with the company totaling about $300,000.

Another city database lists 14 positions filled since November by AITC under OCTO's Information Technology Staff Augmentation program. For two of those positions, both systems-security-related, the person was to report to Yusuf Acar, the OCTO employee arrested early this morning.