A contractor who is "offshoring" part of its work for the Utah Department of Workforce Services to a call centre in India is willing to renegotiate, but warned that moving back would come at a price, the state legislators were told.
Moving the call centre work back to the United States would cost Utah $63,000 more per year, the department's director of finance John Nixon said during a Utah Technology Commission discussion of the Workforce Services contract with eFunds, a United States-based company whose Indian centre handle calls about the department's electronic Horizons welfare benefit cards.
Another option is having the state handle the work, but implementing a 24 hours, seven days a week operation could cost up to $1 million, he said.
The work now is handled by the equivalent of four full-time workers, but it would take more than that for the state to operate a similar around-the-clock setup, he said.
Offshoring has led state lawmakers proposing bills and governors issuing orders aimed at keeping jobs tied to state government at home.
So far there is little progress, even though 35 states are considering measures that would sharply restrict or ban out-of-state and overseas outsourcing, several newspapers reported.