This article is more than 1 year old

Why Indiana and New Jersey were right

The smart money stays at home

Letters “Indiana's decision to scrap the TCS contract will appease voters, media and unions in the short term, but it will probably force the state to spend more taxpayers' dollars on revamping the benefit claims system than it had planned. New Jersey now spends $340,000 per month on supporting its welfare benefits applications from a call center in Camden, which represents a 28% premium over the $266,200 monthly charge it was paying for the service when it was delivered from Mumbai.”

Government IT: wasting money to win votes

Can you be any more slanted in a headline? I ask why on earth would a government of the people by the people take tax payer money and throw it out to a foreign nation's economy? There are perfectly skilled Hoosiers who can fill this employment need. Indiana is constantly ranked at the bottom of the list for high paying IT jobs. I pay the taxes in this state and the real money wasting is done elsewhere. The previous governor had squandered the largest budget surplus in Indiana history, requested the single largest tax increase and still when the money ran out he sold our jobs to India. There are people who have had to put their houses up for sale because the property tax doubled and they cannot afford to pay it. Not something that would make one popular in this state. Tragically he died from a strokejust days before the story broke...

Dave Clark



What was causing the uproar wasn't simply that the money was going out of the state. The problem was that the contract was for Indiana's Office of Workforce Development - most accurately translated as "the unemployment office". The state of Indiana has been very hard-hit by the IT job crash. I know many people in the industry who have great qualifications and are skilled at what they do, but have been unemployed or under-employed for over a year. I was unemployed in my field for 50 weeks. The OWD is supposed to be helping unemployed people get jobs, not sending jobs out of the state when there are plenty of qualified people here who can do the work. It is on the surface merely an "image issue" but the fact is that the contract was built in such a way that it was impossible for any local, qualified firm to win it. A perusal of the related story items in the Indianapolis Star would confirm this.

Robert Spelman



It is smarter for government to pay local in-state centers than to outsource. Sending money to a foreign country is money that is never going to come back to the state. If they spend their money on internal companies, they will get payroll taxes, corporate taxes, taxes on equipment, taxes on telecom connections and keep jobs in their state. Money spent by a state within its own state remains in circulation. Saving money by outsourcing out of country is a net loss for a state government. It makes more sense for states to spend taxpayer money inside the state where some of it will come back to the state and help their own economy. I hope more states and the Federal government start to follow this line of thinking.

Jim Mogle
Kissimmee, Fl.
Systems Tech
®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like