LINCOLN (AP) - Amid growing national concern over U.S. jobs being lost to foreign companies, the State of Nebraska has picked a firm from India over two U.S. companies that submitted lower bids to update some of its computer systems.
The Department of Labor signed a $7.9 million contract last month with TCS America, a branch of the information technology firm Tata Consultancy Services of India, or TCS.
The two-year contract calls for TCS to upgrade the Labor Department's computer system to better handle unemployment benefits.
A similar deal with TCS and the State of Indiana was canceled last year by Indiana Gov. Joe Kernan when he found out that two American companies lost bids for the contract.
Kernan then created a program to give Indiana companies help bidding on government contracts.
Gov. Mike Johanns declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the contract, referring questions to State Labor Commissioner Fernando Lecuona III.
Lecuona referred calls about the contract to spokesman Chris Triebsch, who said the department weighed concerns about U.S. jobs being lost when it signed the deal with TCS.
"Our feeling on that is that we do live in a global economy - but what we have attempted to do is balance that out," he said.
To do that, he said, the contract requires TCS to hire 25 percent of the workers for the project locally and for all the work to be done on-site - even work done by workers from outside the United States.
"There are people coming here that are not from the United States who will be working on that," Triebsch said. "But they are going to be working here, locally."
Five companies submitted bids, but one was disqualified because its proposal did not meet the requirements.
The four remaining bids ranged from $6 million to $13.5 million. TCS's bid of $7.9 million was the second-highest.
State Sen. Chris Beutler of Lincoln said that while he did not know all the facts about the awarding of the contract, he had some concerns.
"It is troublesome," he said. "I would want to know why an American company was unacceptable, especially when they had a lower bid."
Don Medinger of the State Department of Administrative Services said the contract was awarded based on other criteria, including oral presentation by company officials.
India is the leader among several countries that develop software and handle back office work for foreign companies and government agencies at a fraction of the cost of U.S. firms.
But the practice has become a hot-button issue as overseas companies either ship U.S. jobs abroad or send their employees to the United States to do the work.
TCS spokesman Victor Chayet said the company has 30,000 employees worldwide, including 7,000 in North America.
"The issue of . . . where the work comes from, in an increasingly global economy, makes increasingly less difference," he said. "Geography makes very little difference in the efficiency of the delivery of . . . services.
"When you look only at the surface of the issue, you're going to come away with a very simplistic analysis," he said.
