Interesting. Frankly, I'm glad to hear it. We hear so much about not being able to compete.

From personal working experience with Indian IT personnel over the last year or so, I can wholeheartedly concur with bluedogok. In general, you get half-ass work from someone that can't seem to think for themselves. Apparently, if it's not documented in a manual somwhere, the problem can't possibly exist.

As a result of focusing only on the bottom line instead of the value they receive for the money, the company that I used to work for is in a world of hurt now, and they have no one capable of getting them out of it.

That's exactly what I've had to put up with. It's been a waste of time to
to try.

Maybe it's a conspiracy to make IT so bad that nobody will ever call and
the companies will no longer need to hire them. LOL!

I know a lot of companies have these types on helpdesk queues, answering simple calls and such. They are bad enough from a customer standpoint. But, that's not what I'm referring to.

The people I'm talking about are those who are typically not external-facing to customers, are very experienced and qualified and deal with other equally experienced and qualified professionals. The corporate, back office IT guys supporting the critical systems that keep the business running. People you would expect to have better-than-average knowledge about the systems they are supporting.

Unfortunately, in this case "The Company" ended up trading a very experienced and dedicated IT crew that could tackle any technical obstacle for a pathetic group of cheaply paid drones that have difficulty with the most basic of duties. I'm sure that in the months to come they'll learn that, when it comes to the support of your core business infrastructure at least, you get what you pay for. It may be a very costly lesson.

Yep. And beyond that why pay someone $8 an hour at an American call center when you can pay someone $1 a day to answer a phone all day long. Literally all day long. It's the free market in work. Every lazziez faire minded person should be thrilled to death, right?

That's the answer I was hoping someone would give.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, a business's purpose is to make money and
not create jobs. If all taxes for everybody were cut to the bone then a
business could hire local employees and not have to go overseas. Employees
are a benefit of a prosperous business, not the purpose.

Businesses would probably still go overseas.

The only drawback to overseas customer service is a reputation for poor customer service. Unfortunately, however, since overseas support has become the norm, it's a little hard to call something poor when it's the new industry standard.

The only way to get businesses to hire American customer support is to create a situation where it's more profitable to do things that way.

I, for one, have no problem removing loopholes like this in the tax code. No way should the American taxpayer subsidize overseas operations.

While businesses have a duty to perform their shareholders and only their shareholders, Congress [theoretically] has a duty to perform for the taxpayers, i.e., their constituents. The goal of the Tax Code should be overall "fairness" (which I will readily admit, with its 'progressive' tax scheme, it's already inherently unfair). Without attacking other obvious issues, overall fairness should never include rewarding businesses for doing things which in the long and short run harm the taxpayers and the economy.

From either partisan angle, this just shouldn't be happening. Liberals want the tax code to be a tool for shaping public policy in order to redistribute wealth to the poor. If that's the case, allowing this deferral of income from overseas operations makes no sense.

From the conservative side of things, everyone should be paying a similar rate of tax and no one should be getting more breaks than anyone else (I refuse to address the moonbats who think we can get by with no federal taxation, that's just a romantic notion at this juncture).

Either way, same result, the loopholes should close.

Seconded.

I've been working with an ever-increasing number of "sourced" personnel within our IT group. One instance of the outsourcing of a specific segment is on the verge of becoming a complete disaster.

It's not that simple. Taxes are only a tiny portion of the cost differential. The quality is lacking but people said the exact same thing when Japan was first introducing products to our market.

What is at play is that the US is a maturing market and marketplace while India, China and other places are emerging capitalist markets. It's inexperienced youth vs experienced old age. Eventually, the inexperienced youth catches on.

Here's a good site advertising call and outsourcing centers that pitches to the multinational corp:

juno software

I'm going to disagree.

You didn't read the chart, did you. If you had you would have seen it broken down as follows:

Monthly Cost per person
IT or Call center US Cost:.... Indian IT or Call Center

Salary.............. $ 2500 ..... Salary........... $ 500
Taxes..20%....... $ 500 ......Overhead........ $ 125
Overhead 20%... $ 500 ......Misc Exp, ...etc $ 42
Insurance 20%... $ 500

Total.................$ 4000 .....Total...............$ 667

That's $ 48,000 year cost compared to $ 8000

If you reduced taxes by 5% you'd save $ 300 from a $ 40,000 differential. Like I said, tiny portion of the difference.

For the record, I have used Indian based drafting services and even though the cost was much cheaper I was not happy with the service or the finished product and I wouldn't try it again.

I am not promoting their usage, just explaining why big companies would set up call centers, drafting rooms, data input centers, even accounting centers. If you read the site I linked to, you'll get a better idea.

Hi Stan. The information you posted has been out there for public consumption for some time, I'm glad you posted it here. There's a reason why tax exposure is usually not in the top five issues that a business considers when relocating. It's the same reason a state government lowering a tax rate doesn't magically attract tons of businesses to that state. The majority of a business' employee-related costs are from wages and health care. And as you pointed out, even if American taxes were dropped to zero, in a laisse faire environment the Indian workers are still an order of magnitude cheaper.

But, currently we're cutting taxes through deductions and deferments for companies if they do go overseas. This effectively makes it so that we are taxing companies with local employees at a higher rate, therefore incentivizing going overseas. This plan is trying to address exactly that. Maybe one day this will eventually lead to a tax cut for ALL businesses, but unfortunately that is not part of the plan. Until then, maybe we can at least stop putting local companies at an inherent disadvantage to multinationals, who already have scale advantages.

And it needs to come to an end. I can't imagine BO and the democrats doing
anything in the best interest of business. We'll have to wait and see.

I disagree. If an already successful and prosperous company wishes to become more prosperous and make more money yet, it has to first create jobs.

The Cayman Islands are not a tax haven. The Cayman Islands have full tax transparency treaties with the IRS and the European Union jurisdictions and cannot be used to evade tax as all the information on any account is available to the tax authorities in the United States and Europe.

The term “tax haven” actually describes those jurisdictions that have no tax transparency treaties. These jurisdictions include countries with close ties to the U.S., and the U.S. government is fully aware of their status. They include Switzerland, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Andorra, Lichtenstein and Monaco.

U.S. corporations are taxed in the jurisdiction in which they operate – including their subsidiaries, regardless of where they are incorporated. Offshore financial centers like the Cayman Islands simply enable American companies to compete internationally and reinvest their profits.

Of course, treaties with the U.S. – like the Tax Information Exchange Agreement – ensure financial transparency and make certain tax evasion does not occur. These treaties provide a clear distinction between the Cayman Islands and non-transparent jurisdictions such as those listed as uncooperative tax havens by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).

Cayman Islands Financial Services Association, which represents the financial servics industry in the Caymans, fully supports amending the tax reporting legislation to provide fully proactive reporting to the U.S. that mirrors the structure with all 27 European Union jurisdictions under the EU Savings Directive.

Absolutely incorrect.

The purpose of a company is not to create jobs. Jobs are one of the benefits
that occur after a business becomes successful.

The left can't grasp this very simple fact.

Oh, I misread the title of this thread.... I thought it said "Obama to tax crack havens." I thought, "hell, why not, he's taxing everything else, why not crack havens..... my bad.

Crack operations are subject to the tax code as well... unfortunately, more often than not, drug dealers fail to timely pay income taxes.

Companies that off-shore jobs are generally not long for this world. The problem with off-shoring jobs is that the money saved is usually a short-term mask for deeper problems at the company. If a company uses off-shored labor to save a few dollars but never address the fundamental problems that led to the cash shortage in the first place then all the company has done is bought themselves a few more years before failure.

Someone said earlier - you get what you pay for. When I advise companies, I tell them the following.

1. You usually get less than pay for,
2. You rarely get what you pay for, and
3. You never get more than you pay for.

What has always stunned me is the corporate executives don’t live their lives they way they run their companies. Company after company outsources back-office system support to Indian companies but you never see an executive taking their BMW to a gas station for repair. Why is that?

__________________
Oklahoma City - The surprise your family has been looking for.

Once again, people need to grasp that it really is an undeniable fact that the purpose of a company is to create jobs. After all, no one can deny that a company had to start with one job and if the purpose of the company was to meet expansion needs then it had to add more jobs. How anyone can deny this is showing a lack of good business sense.

Everyone can deny that because it is patently absurd. The purpose of any business is to make money... to return the investments of its shareholders. Jobs can be a side effect of growth. The purpose of growth being to make more money, not to create more jobs. If you can grow your business without creating a single job it may be much more profitable. On many occasions to grow a business jobs can be cut. In other occasions a business MUST cut jobs to continue to exist. You may have the worst "business sense" I have ever heard. Either that you will just say anything to try to defend whatever your original absurd point is. Want to rehash your last ridiculous assertion that secret gays in Oklahoma have more rights than open gays?

What kind of strange lonely bubble must you live in to have these bizarrely distorted views of reality?

A business exists for 3 reasons ranked in order:
1. To make money
2. To provide goods and/or services
3. To provide employment and other benefits to its employees/owner(s)


You can't take 100 people and say, alright! We're a company. Now what do we do? Lets see..... lets make something. Any ideas on what we should make? Should we make cars? No, can't afford the assembly line or the raw materials. We need money. Lets start off making disco balls. From the money we make producing that we can then BUY the assembly line stuff. Oh, no market for disco balls anymore? Dang.

WHAT am I going to do with these 100 employees?

See how assbackwards that is?

1st you must identify a marketable service/product
2nd you must finance the means by which to get your service or product to market
3rd you must create a demand for your product or service (it is at this point where you might actually start employing people other than yourself)
4th you must produce or perform your service. (this is the main point employment might come into play. If you are a sole owner of a computer repair firm, it still might just be only you.)
5th you grow your company. (here is where the demands of day to day operations exceed your capabilities and you add staff and employees)
6th you have to MAKE a profit (or at least break even with your costs) otherwise your employees go home.

Job creation is way down the priorty list of any and all compainies.

Fixed it for you.

If a business can make money without providing goods/services or employing anybody it would not only still be a viable business, t may even be the best business ever.

The goal of a business is to make money. Period.