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hudsonhorizons wrote:
And again, outsourcing has exactly what to do with the subject of this thread?

And newsflash, heights. India and Pakistan are two different countries.[quote]
I was commenting by responding to HH stating that the 2 countries in question are seperate. I am well aware of that, it had nothing to do with the Brits. or what went on at that time. And yes blame the individual born in the independent country.

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Well, yes, I thought that's what you were thinking

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How true, my sentiments exactly.

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Yeah, how much more appropriate to blame the actions of Britain 60+ years ago rather than the individual who was born in an independent country. I guess once Britain granted Pakistan independence it was inevitable that this dirtbag was going to come here and start racketeering.

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good job. Now that you've gotten started you might want to dig deeper into that wiki article. Yes, India and Pakistan share a colonial history. However, they are very diffent today especially if you're going to talk about outsourcing. I don't think any company in their right mind would want to outsource to Pakistan and even if they did, they couldn't. They simply don't have the infrastructure in place. India on the other hand... yes, just about everyone outsources there.

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It has to do with trust read the articles, inverted out-sorcing can hurt the economy of this county. And you can thank the Brits for giving freedom in 1947 to these 2 countries, one newly formed at that time.

And again, outsourcing has exactly what to do with the subject of this thread?

And newsflash, heights. India and Pakistan are two different countries.

Inverted Outsorcing at it's best: What a crime it is.

http://www.nj.com/opinion/jjournal/ed ... 23373234233651.xml&coll=3

http://www.silive.com/opinion/editori ... even_more_outrageous.html

Editorial in today's Jersey Journal
Even more outrageous
Posted by mhanley February 03, 2009 08:11AM

It appears that at least a dozen U. S. banks whose CEOs came to Washington, D.C., hats in hand, pleading for billions of dollars didn't consider those Americans who bailed them out capable or desirable as employees.


According to a report from The Associated Press, the same banks that received billions -- the largest bailout in history -- requested visas for tens of thousands of foreign workers to fill high-paying jobs.


The visa requests were for every position from human resources specialists to senior vice presidents, lawyers and analysts. In all, the banks requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers.

The average annual salary for these lucky individuals: $90,721. That's twice the median income for all American households -- at least before the economic meltdown that has seen hundreds of thousands lose their homes, jobs and retirement funds.

It also represents an increase in visa requests by the banks of nearly one third, from 3,258 in the 2007 budget year to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.

The AP reviewed visa applications the banks filed with the Labor Department under the H-1B visa program, which allows temporary employment of foreign workers in specialized-skill and advanced-degree positions.

During the last three months of 2008, the largest banks that received taxpayer loans announced more than 100,000 layoffs. It is unknown how many of those who were pink-slipped were foreign workers.

Other companies, not just banks, seek out foreign employees because they can be paid less, although the law specifically mandates that they receive the prevailing wage. The rule can be skirted -- and often is -- in several ways, including using the lower end of government wage scales even for highly skilled workers; hiring younger foreigners with lower salary demands, and hiring foreigners with higher levels of education or advanced degrees for jobs for which similarly educated American workers would be considered overqualified, the AP reported.

John Miano of Summit, N.J., a lawyer who has analyzed the wage data and started the Programmers Guild, an advocacy group that opposes the H-1B system, told the AP: "The system provides you perfectly legal mechanisms to underpay the workers."

He's right.

Surely, however, many of the highly skilled, white-collar Americans, who find themselves facing being thrown out of their homes, would be more than happy to work for reduced salaries.

David Huber of Chicago, a computer networking engineer, is one of those. He testified before Congress about losing out on a 2002 job with the former Bank One Corp. Mr. Huber said he learned later the bank applied to hire dozens of foreign visa holders for work he said he was qualified to do.

"American citizenship is being undermined working in our own country," Mr. Huber said.

An angry Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, spoke for many when he told the AP: "In this time of very, very high unemployment . . . and considering the help these banks are getting from the taxpayers, they're playing the American taxpayer for a sucker."

Just in time to perhaps salvage something positive from the situation, Mr. Grassley and Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., announced that they will be pushing for passage of legislation that would mandate employers recruit American workers first, along with other changes to the visa program.

President Barack Obama has announced that future bailout funds will come with strict strings attached. He is lobbying lawmakers, particularly Republicans, to back the measure's requirements. One of those strings should be that banks and other institutions cannot seek to hire foreign workers or apply for visas for those workers until every effort has been made to hire Americans first for all positions.

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[]Go ahead give your social "security" number to these phonies but before you do read on....[]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/04/business/expose.php

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/business/10outsource.html?_r=2

[]International Herald Tribune
Fraud reports worry India outsourcing firms
By Saritha Rai
Published: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2006
BANGALORE, India: A British television documentary scheduled to air this week threatens to expose the seamier side of the business of outsourcing customer service phone calls from Europe and the United States to India.
Channel 4 of Britain said it would show a program Thursday investigating "call center security failures, which allow personal financial details to be stolen and illegally traded."
In a 12-month undercover investigation, the broadcaster "infiltrated criminal networks which trade British consumers' bank and other confidential information for huge profits in India, the world's call center capital," according to Channel 4's Web site.
The station said that it would expose security failures in a number of commercial call centers in India.
Several British newspapers and Star News, an Indian satellite broadcaster, have reported extensively on some of the investigation. Two Indian middlemen are shown in one video, purportedly selling customers' confidential data for ?5, or $9.40.
Channel 4 program quotes a leading British data protection lawyer, Stewart Room, as saying that the evidence was so compelling that the investigation would "trigger an official reaction against outsourcing to India," referring to an inquiry by the authorities in London in conjunction with the authorities in New Delhi.
The Indian outsourcing industry trade body, Nasscom, and some senior company executives in India were worried that the program, and sting operations in the past, would damage the country's reputation as a location with an abundant supply of low-cost, skilled labor that delivers quality service to overseas customers. Nasscom said that it had asked Channel 4 to provide details of the allegations but that the request had so far been refused.
"We are concerned about the verifiability of such stories, especially sting operations where monetary inducements were provided," Kiran Karnik, president of Nasscom, said in a statement. "Sting operations sometimes go beyond uncovering wrongdoing and actually induce criminal activity that is then recorded and aired."
Industry executives in India are suggesting that repeated sting operations are being undertaken against the Indian industry with the express intention of maligning its reputation.
"Sting operations in the past have tried to crucify India's back office industry," said Raman Roy, chairman of Quatrro BPO Solutions, a company based in New Delhi that offers call center. financial, legal and technological services to customers in the United States and Britain.
Roy, an industry pioneer, said that the premise of the Channel 4 program was implausible, sensationalist and based on incomplete and incorrect information.
The fear among Indian companies is that Western customers will hesitate to outsource after India is repeatedly projected as an unsafe outsourcing destination.
Much to its embarrassment, the industry has been hit lately by a series of security breaches.
Last year, a few employees of MphasiS, based in Pune, were arrested after being accused of defrauding several Citibank customers in New York of thousands of dollars by cajoling them into disclosing their Internet banking passwords.
Later in the year, the British tabloid Sun splashed details of a sting operation in which it said it had purchased confidential data on more than 1,000 British nationals from an employee of an outsourcing company based in the suburbs of New Delhi.
Earlier this year, an employee of HSBC's call center in Bangalore was accused of selling customers' credit card data to a group in Britain that skimmed thousands of pounds from the customers' bank accounts.
Nasscom defended the industry, saying that its record was much better than the records of countries in the West. In the past 18 months, 148 incidents of identity theft alone have been reported in the United States, and in Britain such thefts have led to losses of more than ?1 billion.
"India is not immune, but fraud here is limited," Nasscom said. "Less than 10 cases of security breaches have been reported so far."
The industry is scrambling to combat the perception of fraud. Companies have joined in setting up a National Skills Registry, an online registry for industry workers that would contain information about individual workers' professional, educational and personal backgrounds.
The information is validated by an independent agency but owned by the individual. So far, 25,000 workers have registered for the independent checks and biometric identification established earlier this year.
But the television report scheduled for Thursday has some Indian executives sounding worried. "The documentary will do a lot of damage," said Roy of Quatrro. "The industry will have to go through a process of educating everybody."]


[]N.Y. Times
January 10, 2009
After a Fraud in India, Government Steps In
By HEATHER TIMMONS and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
NEW DELHI ? Like some of the biggest names in Western banking, Satyam Computer Services appears to be headed for a government bailout. And while the root cause may be different ? one of the largest corporate frauds in Indian history ? the goal is the same: shoring up the confidence of investors and clients.
In India?s case, for a whole country.
Satyam, India?s fourth-largest outsourcing company, is struggling for survival after its founder, B. Ramalinga Raju, admitted to lying about the company?s assets. Its demise could put its 53,000 employees out of work and affect operations like billing and computer systems at its clients, which include some of the largest companies in the world.
With the scandal erupting as the red-hot outsourcing industry starts to cool, a chorus of analysts and investors suggested that the government should intervene to make sure Satyam?s clients are not affected and that confidence is restored in the stability of Indian outsourcers.
Mr. Raju said Wednesday that he had fabricated $1 billion worth of cash and bank balances, nearly all of the company?s cash assets.
On Friday, Indian authorities took over the company?s board; the market regulator introduced new checks on company audits; the Indian accounting board started investigating Satyam?s auditor, the local unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers; and state police arrested Mr. Raju and his brother, Rama Raju, a former company executive who had continued to hold a seat on Satyam?s board until resigning last week.
They were charged with criminal breach of trust, criminal conspiracy, cheating, falsification of records and forgery.
?The question becomes, Will the Indian government step in or will the company be sold either as a whole or in pieces?? analysts from Forrester Research said in a note Friday.
?This is an election year, and there are a lot of considerations? for the government to think about at Satyam, including employees, investors and especially small investors, Sudin Apte, one author of the research report, said in an interview. Satyam might be able to continue until it finds a buyer with another $1 billion in cash, said another analyst who did not want to be identified because his bank stopped covering Satyam when the fraud was revealed.
Indian officials seemed to hear the demands, and acted quickly on Friday to try to shore up investor confidence in the company and in India Inc. over all, but stopped short of pledging cash.
Satyam?s remaining board members were fired, and the government said it would appoint 10 new directors shortly. The new board will hold a meeting within seven days, said Prem Chand Gupta, minister for corporate affairs. ?It is the prime concern of the government to ensure that the operations of the company continue uninterrupted,? he said. But the next step could still be to commit desperately needed cash.
If not, Satyam may not have enough cash on hand to meet basic operating expenses like payroll as soon as this month.
On Thursday, the company confirmed the dire state of its financial situation. Satyam?s clients, which include a third of the Fortune 500, depend on the company for things like collections and customer service.
One client, a large American technology company, said that like ?any prudent company would do, we are evaluating risk mitigations.? A person who did not want to be quoted discussing internal deliberations said the company?s chief goal was to avoid a disruption in the services provided by Satyam. There had not been discussion yet about switching outsourcers.
Satyam customers could turn to their software vendors, like SAP, which offer some of the same services that Satyam offers. They could also turn to Satyam?s competitors. Customers often use several outsourcing services. ?There are other vendors in there that could play very quickly, and are probably already trying to pick apart the Satyam account base,? said John C. McCarthy, a vice president at Forrester who covers the outsourcing industry.
The transition will not happen immediately, he said. Customers need to evaluate which tasks Satyam performed for them, who else could take over and how to shift responsibility without disrupting operations. In the meantime, Satyam ?hasn?t ceased operations. They still have 50,000 people doing the work for clients,? he said.
The thing for Satyam clients to watch now, Mr. McCarthy said, is whether Satyam employees start to leave the company.
Some Satyam customers will most likely turn to Infosys Technologies, a Satyam competitor, though the switch has not yet begun. ?It may be too early for such a transfer to take place,? said Peter McLaughlin, an Infosys spokesman. ?I.T. services, including seemingly simple services such as Client Helpdesk, require the right tools, training, systems and processes in place. To avoid any impact to client operations, transfer would be done in stages.?
David Miller, a spokesman for Applied Materials, a Satyam customer that supplies services and products to the semiconductor industry, said, ?Clearly we are monitoring the situation closely and hope it has no effect on our levels of service.? The company cannot elaborate on future plans because of supplier confidentiality agreements, he said.
Any takeover of Satyam is unlikely while questions still hang over the company?s accounts, many bankers say.
Regulators are delving into how and why Mr. Raju was able to fool auditors and investors for several years. India?s market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, began an investigation Thursday into trading of the company?s stock and on Friday met with the Satyam chief financial officer, Srinivas Vadlamani.
So far, the government is balking at the idea of bailing out Satyam.
Jeremy Kahn contributed reporting from Hyderabad, India, and Hari Kumar from New Delhi.[]

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What does this arrest have anything to do with tech support?
(Other than your availing yourself of any opportunity to categorically condemn non-white people, of course.)

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I knew this would happen. I hate that our tech support is based in other countries then they ask for pertinent information that may be considered private.

Jersey City man faces 20 years for international racketeering

by The Star-Ledger Continuous News Desk
Wednesday January 28, 2009, 4:42 PM

A Jersey City man faces 20 years in prison on an international racketeering charge, according to a report by the Jersey Journal.

Mohammad Akhtar, a 52-year-old illegal immigrant, is accused of funneling money to Pakistan and illegally obtaining green cards, federal officials said. Akhtar pleaded guilty to the racketeering charge in October and will be sentenced in a federal court in Maryland next week.

His activities were uncovered in the probe of a Maryland convenience store owner charged with money laundering and bribing officials.