Food stamp call-in center based in India

BOISE – The company that manages Idaho’s food stamp program has subcontracted part of the work to India.

The state administers its electronic benefits transfer program through a contract with New York-based J.P. Morgan Chase, worth about $1.2 million a year of the department’s $1.3 billion budget, Health and Welfare Department spokesman Ross Mason said.

But that company subcontracts the call center portion of the work to MsourcE in India, according to a report by Good Jobs First, an advocacy group for higher-paying jobs in America.

Residents who have questions about their electronic benefits transfer cards – the debit-style cards that have replaced paper food stamps – are directed to a call center. If the question cannot be answered using an automated system, the call is directed overseas, Mason said.

About 150,000 Idaho residents call the system every month, he said, and about 1,100 of those calls are sent to the call center in India. Mason did not know how much each call cost under the contract.

Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne has stressed the need to bring jobs to the state, especially struggling rural communities, and has focused much of his administration on stimulating the economy and reducing Idaho’s unemployment rate, which was 5 percent last month.

But his spokesman, Michael Journee, said that he was aware of no policy aimed at keeping jobs from being subcontracted to offshore groups.

Journee said the impact of the India call center was likely small.

“It’s just a small portion of a contract that had been subcontracted out. It’s hard to see that there’d be a way to keep good track of that, aside from asking any individual agencies to make sure that they do work within the U.S.,” he said.

The J.P. Morgan Chase contract extends through 2010, and it likely wouldn’t be renegotiated unless the Legislature demands it, Mason said.

“It’s safe to say everybody wants to keep jobs in America, short of some corporations,” Mason said. “But you start getting into the lawmaker arena and whether they want to venture into that realm, whether they’re willing to do the things that need to be done to move that direction. It has to be done at the national level as well.”

Tom Johnson, a spokesman for J.P. Morgan Chase in New York, emphasized that the vast majority of the work under the state contract – managing and monitoring the tens of millions of dollars that flow to food stamp recipients through the cards – is done in the United States.

The relative handful of telephone inquiries answered by people off shore “is a very small part of the overall contract,” he said, and states are made aware of the arrangement as part of the disclosures in the contractual process.

“It’s a question of finance,” Johnson said. “We are responding to the needs of the state.”

He said the calls now being handled off shore could be handled in the United States if the state wanted that change, but it would cost more.