Thread: ObamaCare gets outsourced amid unemployment crisis

President Obama spent $831 billion of taxpayer money on a stimulus plan for the economy. He gave nearly $50 billion in aid to GM to keep it afloat. He lost $500 million on energy company Solyndra. All in the name of saving jobs.

Yet when it comes to his own signature initiative, the president doesn’t care about American workers. He’s outsourced ObamaCare.
After the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, the administration hired Accenture as the new lead contractor. The deal is estimated to be worth $90 million and is now in the hands of the poster boy for global labor arbitrage and offshore tax havens.

Accenture has 80,000 Indian workers, 35,000 in the Philippines and only 40,000 in the United States. Over 40 percent of their worth comes from outsourcing. In all probability, the tech jobs awarded under this contract and paid for with US tax dollars are going abroad.

But even if the work is done locally, chances are the employees are foreigners brought in for lower wages using the controversial H-1B visa program — where companies are allowed to hire guest workers from abroad.

In 2012, Accenture ranked fifth among American companies in using H-1B visas. That year alone, Accenture brought into the United States 4,037 foreign workers on H-1B visas.


Tech companies argue they need H-1B visas because there aren’t enough qualified American engineers, yet the facts do not bear this out. In truth there is no tech worker shortage or lack of skills and talent in America. The real motivation of offshore outsourcing companies like Accenture is cost. They use H-1B and other guest-worker visas to pay less wages than they would have to pay an equivalent American worker.

Accenture saves money by underpaying foreign guest workers they import — typically 25 percent less for their imported employees than the prevailing wage for a similar US citizen worker.

Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, analyzed Accenture’s use of the H-1B program. In 2005, the company had 12,684 H-1B foreign guest workers earning an average of $53,042 per year. That’s far less than the median $80,000 salary the same job responsibilities and skills required would fetch for an American worker. Accenture is so bad, they paid a foreign guest worker $25,113 per year — for the title of “chief programmer.” Typically chief programmers make six figures in the United States.

It appears undercutting wages with H-1B visas is part of Accenture’s business model. Hira found that, in 2012, the median salary paid for Accenture’s new H-1B workers was $64,700, while Amazon paid their equivalent H-1B workers a median salary of $95,000. Google, who also uses comparable technical skills sets to Accenture and Amazon, paid a median salary of $110,000 to their new H-1B visa hires.

Accenture also avoids American taxes. The company is headquartered in Chicago, but it’s incorporated in noted tax haven Ireland.
It’s unclear how much money Accenture has avoided paying to the US. But the company caused a scandal in the UK last year when it was revealed it paid only 3.5% in corporate income taxes, when the going rate is 25%.

If you’ve never heard of Accenture, the largest consulting company in the world, that’s by design. Accenture used to be called Arthur Anderson, until it was found to be complicit in the Enron scandal.

But hey, new name, new advertising campaign — who remembers?

And chances are Accenture has kept its nose clean since . . . Except no.

In 2011, Accenture agreed to pay the government nearly $64 million after being accused by the Justice Department of making false claims for payment with agencies for information-technology services. That’s right, they falsely billed the government for IT work. And now they’re running the government’s health-care website.
Accenture also allegedly “falsely inflated prices and rigged bids in connection with federal information technology contracts.” This year, the USPS inspector general also called for suspension of Accenture postal-service contracts due to an increased risk of fraud. Oh, well, sure they can be trusted this time.

So how did Accenture land such a plum contract? The $5.5 million they spent in lobbying in 2012, in addition to the $1.2 million in campaign donations, likely has something to do with it.

America needs jobs. The labor participation rate in the US has dropped to 62.8%, the lowest level since 1978. That’s a record 91 million adult Americans, many who have simply dropped out of the labor force due to a lack of work.

It has been proved repeatedly there is no shortage of Americans with technical skills and talent. In a recent study, Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn and B. Lindsay Lowell found there were 50% more college graduates with technical majors than were hired in related technical positions. Every year only one in two science and technology college graduates obtains employment in their major.

Employment in the fields of science and technology are at 2001 levels, and these figures count foreign guest-worker visa holders!

The president says the biggest problem with the economy is that we’re not spending enough money. Yet Obama doesn’t care that the money he does spend is going to Mumbai, Shanghai and Dublin, along with American jobs. It’s no surprise America’s middle class is becoming extinct.

Robert Oak is the nom de plume of the editor of the website The Economic Populist.

http://nypost.com/2014/01/18/obamaca...oyment-crisis/

Obamacare Outsourced

Submitted by Robert Oak
on January 12, 2014 - 6:32pm

The Obama administration has offshore outsourced Obamacare. They made Accenture the lead contractorfor the website healthcare.gov. The contract is estimated to be worth $90 million and the original contractor, CGI Federal, is out.

We pointed out earlier that the failed Obamacare website was poetic justice as CGI Federal is also an offshore outsourcer of U.S. jobs. But now the poster boy for labor arbitrage, offshore tax havens, and bloated, often failed government contracts is in charge, Accenture.

Accenture is one of the biggest offshore outsourcers of American jobs. In 2012 they used 4,037 H-1B Visas alone and are ranked #5 in using foreign guest workers to displace U.S. workers and offshore outsource jobs. The H-1B Visa is known as the offshore outsourcing Visa. Offshore outsourcers use this Visa in a notorious method to displace Americans and technology transfer large projects to cheap labor nations.

In 2012, the 10 employers receiving the largest number of H-1B visas were all in the business of outsourcing and offshoring high-tech American jobs. Many of the jobs that went to H-1B workers should have instead gone to U.S. workers, but employers are not required to recruit them before applying for an H-1B, and can even replace their U.S. workers with H-1Bs.

Accenture has more workers in India than any other nation. In 2012 they had 80,000 Indian workers, 35,000 in the Philippines and only 40,000 in the United States. In all probability, those tech jobs just awarded under this contract and paid for with U.S. citizen tax dollars are in India or being done by imported foreign workers from India on guest worker Visas.

Accenture, like most BPO offshore outsourcers, saves money by underpaying foreign guest workers they import. Typically they pay 25% less for their imported employees than the prevailing wage for a similar United States citizen worker. In 2005, with the corresponding H-1B Visa good until Q1 2013, Accenture had 12,684 H-1B foreign guest workers earning an average of $53,042 per year. This is far less than the median $80,000 salary the same job responsibilities and skills required would fetch for an American worker. Accenture is so bad, they literally paid a foreign guest worker $25,113 per year with the job title, Chief Programmer. Typically chief programmers make six figures in America. Accenture is systemic in their labor arbitrage of United States citizens. Of their imported H-1B foreign tech workers in 2005, they paid 15.3% less than $40,000 a year and 40% less than $60,000. This is way, way below the kind of salaries one would see for a highly trained, college educated technology professional.

The situation is so bad they block out American contractors from obtaining government contracts by undercutting labor costs in addition to lobbying and campaign contributions.

The H-1B program harms employers that hire American workers. Domestic sourcing companies, such as Ameritas Technologies and Systems in Motion, are being penalized by U.S. Government H-1B policies because they are hiring American workers. Their competitor firms hire H-1B workers because they can be paid less than Americans.

The Obama administration has simply replaced one political corporate crony with another even bigger one. The amount of money these governmentcontracts pay is absolutely obscene. The many failed and terrible government websites are proof positive government contracts are glorified corporate welfare. Worse than that, most Americans with technical skills can architect and design miles above superior quality, extremely efficient systems than what results from these various government contracts, if just given half a chance.

The corruption to obtain Obamacare contracts is beyond the pale and well documented. The Sunlight Foundation published a list of contracters making out like bandits on Obamacare. Accenture has already been awarded$2,136,175.98 just for the Affordable Care Act. Clearly pay to play is operating at full volume in D.C. To obtain these contracts, Accenture spent $5,590,000 in lobbying along with $1,188,644 in campaign contributions in 2012 alone.

In 2010 when Obamacare was being crafted, America was warned on offshore outsourcing of I.T. and health related technology. Accenture was one of those outsourcers pushing for the deal. They also managed to get into the White House with the most absurd public relations stunt. They claimed to retrainpeople whose jobs were sent to India. Get that? Americans have the skills and ability, yet they lose their jobs anyway. The very same outsourcers who caused such massive job loss then get into the While House policy room and push for government subsidies in order to retrain these same American workers. These corporate outsourcers in turn use this newly formed policyagenda as a public relations stunt to claim they are trying to help the American worker. The biggest insult of all of this is the U.S. taxpayer usually foots the bill for such corporate agenda rot such as this.

Accenture has quite a track record and not the good kind. They offshore outsourced taxpayer subsidized green jobs and were lined up to get those 2009 many contracts along these lines. They also have been fined by the DOJ:

Accenture LLP has agreed to pay the United States $63.675 million to resolve a whistleblower lawsuit, the Justice Department announced today.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, alleges that Accenture submitted or caused to be submitted false claims for payment under numerous contracts with agencies of the United States for information technology services.

Accenture has agreed to resolve allegations that it received kickbacks for its recommendations of hardware and software to the government, fraudulently inflated prices and rigged bids in connection with federal information technology contracts.

Accenture has also been a poster boy for tax avoidance. In the U.K., they have been under investigation In 2005 they even managed to get their own special law introduced in Congress to avoid paying taxes:

The Wall Street Journal reported July 14th that, as drafters of a technical corrections bill, you are contemplating including a special provision to shield Accenture from the anti-inversion provisions passed as part of last year's international tax law. Writing new rules with the specific purpose of allowing Accenture to avoid paying millions of dollars in U.S. taxes on its international profits would be extremely unfair to U.S. companies who pay their fair share. We urge you not to incorporate these controversial measures into the legislation.

The fight to keep offshore outsourcers from receiving federal contracts was lost in Congress, that's how bad the D.C. corruption is. Dodging taxes is nowstandard practice and Accenture was ranked 12th of the biggest corporate tax dodgers in 2010.

Accenture is incorporated offshore and has been the subject of many a Congressional hearing on inverted companies incorporated in Bermuda or the Caymans to avoid taxes. Just recently their profits rose another 16% on tax avoidance. This is after the public relations stunt to move company headquarters to Ireland from Bermuda in 2009, so clearly Ireland is just about as good as Bermuda in terms of national tax avoidance. Public relations stunts and corporate branding is something Accenture is big on. Not only did they change their name in the nick of time before the Enron scandal broke, they will do just about any media relations coup to avoid the truth coming out that they are an offshore outsourcer. Yet instead of a slam down on this company and all those like them, here we are in 2013 watching a company who represents everything wrong with America being rewarded a high profile government contract, littered with people's very personal and financial information to boot.

America is being eaten away from the inside out. We have a gigantic parasite killing the nation called legal corruption in Washington D.C. Yet another corporate campaign donor manages to receive a multibillion dollar contract. Unfortunately this is standard fare in Washington. It should be no surprise America's entire middle class is becoming extinct. America's politicians sold 'em out for campaign cash and other legal forms of bribery.

http://www.economicpopulist.org/cont...utsourced-5499

Money is their god.

Obama Brings in Enron Fraud Partner to Fix ObamaCare Website

January 12, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield


You might be wondering, “How could ObamaCare possibly get any worse?”
Good question. After giving a $600 million no-bid contract to an incompetent Canadian company with a terrible track record whose top executive was a pal of Michelle Obama, they’ve decided to get serious and go with a company with a perfect track record.

Accenture.

That sounds safely bland. Like a brand of detergent. Or a website that sells imported French pants. Accenture could be anything at all.

Accenture is a multinational management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Incorporated headquarters are in Dublin, Republic of Ireland while operations headquarters are in Chicago, Illinois.

A Chicago company with an Irish address to dodge taxes. That’s regrettable, but not too surprising. But did this Accenture place happen to have another name? A more familiar name.

Accenture began as the business and technology consulting division of accounting firm Arthur Andersen. On January 1, 2001 Andersen Consulting adopted its current name, “Accenture”.

Arthur Andersen? Wait that sounds oddly familiar.

The U.S. Justice Department today announced the indictment of embattled accounting firm Arthur Andersen on one count of obstruction of justice relating to the collapse of former energy giant Enron Corp.

The obstruction charge is based on claims that Andersen employees shredded important documents about Enron’s finances, even though they knew the Securities and Exchange Commission was formally looking into Enron. The Justice Department also alleges Andersen employees deleted relevant computer files.

Andersen served as Enron’s sole auditor throughout the energy giant’s sixteen years, also performing internal audits and consulting services.

Andersen has recently been involved in several other major auditing scandals. Last year, the SEC fined the firm $7 million for ‘improper professional conduct’, including overstating client Waste Management’s earnings by $1.4 billion. It was the first successful case against an auditor in over 20 years. In May 2001, Anderson also paid $110 million to Sunbeam shareholders to settle lawsuits stemming from its inflated earnings statements.

Andersen and Enron both had deep ties to the Democratic Party and Accenture spends a lot of money on lobbying. The top recipient for Accenture donations is an obscure Chicago politician named Barack Obama.

“The Washington Post reported on Friday that Accenture will get a year-long contract worth about $90 million for the ObamaCare website.”

But at least Accenture doesn’t have a history of failure working with national health care systems.

Accenture has pulled out of the £12.4bn NHS IT programme and terminated the £2bn-worth of contracts it was working on to deliver new patient and GP systems.

Accenture warned in its financial results earlier this year it expected to take a $450m hit on its NHS IT contracts over the next three to four years because of delays that led it to miss the deadlines for delivering working systems.

One NHS IT director in the North East region, who did not wish to be named, told silicon.com there is a mood of “anger” within the NHS at the lack of progress.

The IT director said: “Accenture have done absolutely nothing in the North East and for the past nine to 12 months they have been invisible. They have been here for nearly three years and they have done nothing, yet it has put planning blight on any progress that was being made before.

So this should go well now that Obama has brought on board a Chicago company whose name in professional circles is Accidenture.

Update: Accenture’s Senior Director of Corporate Communications James McAvoy has sent the following corrections along

Accenture is not “a Chicago company with an Irish address to dodge taxes”. Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 281,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Accenture is incorporated in Ireland, to reflect its global business across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Accenture pays tax in accordance with the tax legislation in each country in which it operates. Accenture pays, and has always paid, U.S. tax on income generated by its U.S. operation.

Accenture was never “the business and technology consulting division” Arthur Andersen.” From its establishment in 1989, until its incorporation in 2001, Accenture was a separate legal entity and operated independently from Andersen Worldwide. As you’ll see in the following link, the Huffington Post made a similar error to you on this issue, but corrected it after fact-checking.

Accenture does not “spend a lot of money on lobbying”. Accenture has a policy banning corporate contributions to political parties or candidates. The Accenture employees’ political action committee contributes to Federal candidates who represent areas where our people live and work, and to candidates who share our interest in issues that affect our company, our industry and our people. The Accenture PAC did not contribute to Obama’s Senate campaign in 2004 or his leadership PAC – the HopeFund – once he was in the Senate. Also, the Accenture PAC did not contribute to the 2008 or 2012 Presidential campaign. The figures in your graph refer only to individual contributions may by our employees. All political, lobbying and civic activity by the company and its employees comply with applicable law and Accenture’s Code of Business Ethics.

In response, I note that,

1. The taxes being referred to are not on US operations. The issue has been amply summarized elsewhere.

2. Accenture began life that way, though it eventually split from Arthur Andersen to become Andersen Consulting, but remained part of Andersen Worldwide until later than the period under discussion.

3. Open Secrets lists a number of lobbying firms hired by Accenture

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgr...acare-website/

Obamacare Crashes Related To Obama’s Outsourcing The Work To Indian Companies

October 11, 2013 · by thscollapsereport · in Uncategorized · 1 Comment
It’s another slap in the face to American software engineers, two of the main companies that implemented the faulty crashing Obamacare exchanges – Infosys and Cognizant – are American subsidiaries of Indian body shopper and outsourcing companies. In fact, Cognizant and Infosys were the top users of H-1B visas in America. The H-1B visa, the visa which allows low level Indian programmers with fake degrees to get US citizenship, is used to throw better qualified American engineers into the streets or drive down pay. Imagine if we fought the high cost of doctors salaries by bringing in 577,428 (the number of H-1B applications approved in 2012) Indian doctors who took a two week course and worked for 20 dollars an hour.
The GAO has conducted three studies of the H-1B visa and each time found extensive fraud in more than 25% of all applications. And that was only obvious fraud in depth examination would probably expose that many of these applicants either had no degree at all or went to a dubious or fraudulent fly by night university. Even if they have a valid degree often their entire resumes are falsified. So many companies that have fired their American engineers and replaced them with cheaper Indian programmers find out all too fast that they either go bankrupt or struggle (Dell is the latest case in point). (Note: Xerox was one of the few American companies which was awarded work as well)

Infosys was awarded the 50 million Washington DC exchange contract and at least four other states. With defense work slowing, the Indian companies are making a big push to own the exchanges as these promise work for years. But there’s a problem. Programming the exchanges is quite complicated, involving interfacing with legacy Medicare systems and if not done correctly they may seem to work but fall apart as soon as large numbers of users begin using them.

Cognizant won the Illinois contract through no-bid channels. “Two weeks ago, Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn became national news for circumventing a three-year procurement process on up to $190 million in no-bid IT contracts. Last week, we found that one of the largest bid-contract awards outsources state jobs to H-1B contractors from India. The Democratic governor awards $71.4 million contract to an outsourcing firm billing up to $256,160 per year per position — plus $200,000 taxpayer financed “slush fund” for travel. “Outsourced” at home in Illinois… at a higher cost A $71.4 million IT contract was awarded to Cognizant Technology Solutions, which ranks in the top seven [Actually, FIRST!] for procuring H-1B visa workers. As soon as the Illinois contract was signed, evidence shows the company has applied for more than 100 H-1B visas with the United States Department of Labor” – Huffington Post

Looking at the source code directly reveals several staggering mistakes. They have coded nearly whole pages of text and every possible response directly into the web page as a resource whether it is used or not. The more modern method is to fetch it dynamically using AJAX without requiring a full page reload. This made all the pages quite large and heavy which meant the site quickly bogged down under heavy load. There’s no telling what other mistakes were made. They were also using Experian for identity verification, another heavy load on a system which would have to support millions of users. Was it architected for the cloud to dynamically grow resources? Doesn’t look like it.

For example, the Javascript file loaded for each user transfers all error messages, form field messages and front-end error messages from the server to the user’s browser repeatedly for each cultural language supported by the system.
In other words, the entire set of error messages is hard-coded into the Javascript for English, then again for German, then again for French, Spanish, and so on, all the way through Gujarati and who knows how many other unheard-of languages.
I don’t even know how to begin to tell you how disastrously idiotic such a design is. It practically guarantees a critical server crash under any kind of real user load. No programmer with an IQ above 100 would design js code in such a manner. This code was designed and written by utterly incompetent people who have built into the system exactly the kind of architecture that will make it fail if anyone tries to use it.” – Mike Adams, NaturalNews.com
Every time people go with the cheap foreign programmers the result is the same – a god aweful mess. IBM routinely staffs its consulting projects with H-1B Indians and it’s consulting failures are beginning to mount, most recently the Pennsylvania unemployment contract which Pennsylvania finally canceled in disgust after long overruns and problems. The thought that you can replace American engineers with Indians and simply increase profits without risk is a lie.
That Obama would even allow the work to go to Indian companies and not American citizens is just another slap in the face by a government that is hell bent on destroying the native engineering workforce and endlessly tries to flood the country with cheap foreign engineering labor. The four million engineers who arrived on the H-1B visa have decimated wages in a jobs market that is only 4.5 million large. Things are so bad that contract wages are even lower than they were twenty years ago NOT ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION. Why does the government want to destroy the American software engineer? The truth is the big software moguls who got rich BEFORE the H-1Bs arrived – like Bill Gates – have lobbied congress about a labor shortage. The only shortage is in their willingness to pay decent wages and their pants.
In this interview, Obama states that tech companies keep telling him they are having a hard time finding people (see bill gates video below). Well they are lying. It’s about wages. Sure for 20,000 a year salaries they are having trouble placing people who spent 200,000 dollars on their education worked extremely hard and in the old days were paid as much as doctors and lawyers. Why Obama can’t see through the lies is just ridiculous. All he has to do is check the unemployment rolls.
Another common lie is that skills are not up to date. But that doesn’t hold water. What’s really going on with the H-1B visa is that many of these companies are located in areas where houses cost over a million dollars. Older experienced workers can’t raise their families in one bedroom apartments and are requesting living salaries and instead of paying that, the companies sneak in younger H-1B workers who often live six to an apartment to save money. That’s fine when you are twenty two and trying to make it and get experience, it’s less welcomed to have to do that at forty five with three children.

In a nation that has created only 63,000 private sector jobs since Obama took office six years ago, these acts are shameful. Which senator or congressman will step up andensure that these jobs go only to American citizens and American companies. Perhaps if they did that, we could actually afford to pay for Obamacare.

Top H-1B visa approvals by company
Company Visa approvals
Cognizant 5715
Infosys 4042
Wipro 2817
Tata 1758
Larsen & Toubro 1608
Microsoft 1586
Accenture 1370
HCL America 1128
IBM 1063
Google 615
Source: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.

http://collapsereport.com/2013/10/11...ian-companies/