It’s rare these days to find stories in the news that make one want leap for joy.  This is one of those stories.  Tata is an Indian Information Technology (IT) consulting firm doing business under the names Tata America International, Tata Consultancy Services, TCS America, Tata Infotech and Tata Sons, Ltd.  Since moving to the U.S., Tata has been a rising star in the IT consulting business - winning bid after bid to develop and support IT systems.  They have been so successful, they even got a VIP welcome to New York from Senator Hillary Clinton.  Hillary’s welcome to them was despite the fact that they hire mostly imported workers on H-1B visas (i.e. guest workers).  They only hire Americans for the marketing positions to show an American face to the client. 

 

The propaganda campaign to justify the import of foreign workers has been voluminous and insulting.  We are told that the Indians win bids because they are better educated and more highly skilled. Mexicans work harder and do jobs Americans won’t do.   The truth is that imported foreign workers are cheaper and more easily exploitable as we can see in the Tata story regarding a class action lawsuit filed by Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, LLP.  Tata had a scam going on in which they cheated their imported employees out of a goodly portion of their already low wages. 

 

The way the scam works is that the imported employees are required to use a particular firm that Tata hired to determine their tax liability and to file their tax returns.  The imported employees were then told that they must turnover their tax refunds to Tata. When the tax refund checks came, the employee’s were required to endorse them over to Tata America.  So what Tata did in effect, was to steal a portion of the employee’s wages using the income tax witholding system!  

 

So how much money is involved?  According to the plaintiff, Gopi Vedachalam, he was forced to sign over state and federal tax refund checks totaling $25,000.  Clearly, there had to be overwithholding to reach that amount of money in just five years of working for Tata.  Tata has over 5,000 employees in the U.S.   That’s a staggering amount of money that would essentially be ‘off the books - free money’. 

 

Speculating, if Tata took cash withdrawals corresponding to the amounts of the endorsed checks, the net effect to Tata’s bank account would be zero.  That would make it completely untraceable cash.  So what could Tata do with that kind of untraceable cash?  Kickbacks?  No doubt.  Bribes?  Probably.  The most worrisome possibility is that the money could have been used to fund terrorism.  If you’ve been following what the war on terrorism has done for the IT Industry in terms of contracts for control and tracking systems, you know that terrorism has been the best thing to happen to the industry since the integrated circuit board. 

 

The misnamed ‘free trade’ in services is what brought Tata to our shores to take jobs away from American citizens and to create the conditions in which they can steal from their own countrymen.  Trade in services is nothing more than modern day slave trade by men with good educations, refined manners and expensive suits.  The trade agreements put the multinational corporations in the position to engage in global labor arbitrage and it is threatening the future of America as a first world country.  In fact, Silicon Valley has been exported to India.   Perhaps the time has come to stop looking for terrorists in caves in the desert and start looking for them where they really are - in the boardrooms of America’s best corporations and in the halls of Congress.  Oh… and let’s not forget the Universities.