The Tax Free Tour - tax havens and outsourcing

A doc about the stateless offshore world of tax havens. 

Why does Apple only pay 1.9% tax?
The Big Four : Price Waterhouse Coopers, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG

Former KPMG man : "They are the constant feature of every tax haven. Without one of those firms, or maybe all of those firms being present, you really will not have a tax haven."

He describes how the Big Four as he calls them are hired by governments to guide financial rules that benefit the Big Four.

So remember back in Sept 2011 when Steve gave Deloitte a $20-million contract to advise federal cabinet and senior officials on how to trim $4 billion from government program spending in order to balance the books by 2014?  

Ah -an outsourcing firm is being hired to recommend more outsourcing we said at the time, remembering a 2010 CBC report on the 80% increase in a parallel civil service made up of consulting firms.

At the same time, Deloitte, CORE-outsourcing, and Ryerson's Ted Rogers School of Management teamed up to produce a joint research initiative using Deloitte's "proprietary outsourcing maturity model". It was called The 3 E's of Effective Outsourcing Governance -Experience, Essentials, and Empathy -because that sounds better than Externalizing accountability, Eff Off Unions, and Economic entropy.

They projected that "almost $25 billion worth of outsourcing contracts in Canada [are] to be renewed or renegotiated over the next three years."

Pictured at the top of their 3 E's report are Ray Lavitt, President of CORE; Ian Chan, Principal at Deloitte; and Ron Babin, Professor at Ryerson.  
All three have outsourcing and/or offshoring creds : 

• Lavitt was "VP, Global Sourcing at CIBC" before becoming CEO of CORE
• Chan is "Leader of Deloitte Canada's Outsourcing Advisory Practice" and 
• Babin was "a partner at Accenture and at KPMG", according to his Ryerson bio, and "his area of research is IT Planning and IT Governance with a specific focus on IT outsourcing and off-shore delivery."

Lavitt and Babin featured in an article a month ago at CBC : Offshore outsourcing 'not always a negative thing'

Lavitt is President of CORE; Chan and Babin are CORE board members.

So how did Steve's outsourcing report from Deloitte work out for us?
FinMin Jim Flaherty announced a trim to Ottawa’s annual spending by $5 billion a year in budget cutbacks in programs and services to eliminate the $26-billion deficit by 2015.

As of Dec. 31, 2012, 16,220 public service positions were eliminated, even though according to Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in 2011 :

Over the past five years, personnel outsourcing costs have risen 79%. While federal departments have had their budgets capped, expenditures on outside consultants have not been touched and remain above $1 billion a year,” says Macdonald.

Wednesday May 8 update : 

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

Thursday May 9 update :
Hundreds of public servants at seven departments received notices today that their jobs are on the block as part of the Conservative government’s ongoing spending cuts

Watch the doc. 
See also International Consortium of Investigative Journalists/offshore
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The invisible hand of the market outsourcing

CBC Go Public's Kathy Tomlinson on The Current :

 "A single mom, an experienced IT worker, couldn't find work for seven months. She heard one of the Indian firms had a project going at one of the banks here so she asked the manager who she knew who was here from India to hire her to oversee it. He said he'd think about it. Then she says he called back to say he would give her the job if she would agree to kickback $8 an hour from her salary to him - a cash commission, he called it. She took the deal because she says she'd rather pay him to work than not have the job."

So Canadians are now having to pay off the insourced scam artists who cost them their jobs to get work at all, even as foreign temporary workers have increased 700% since 2001 and Ottawa is currently inking a trade deal with India to increase labour mobility.

Jason Kenney : 

"Intra-company transfers in the vast majority of cases are a completely normal part of international commerce ... The obligations we have have for intra-company transfars are often hard-wired into trade agreements."

Conspokesbot Kellie Leitch, parlsec for Diane Finley of Human Resources, responds to Anna Maria Tremonti's specific question about companies bypassing government labour market opinions to get fast-tracked on international intra-company transfers :

"The program's intent is not to replace Canadian workers ... We had concerns with respect to what was happening with iGATE and the government acted extremely quickly to begin an investigation to make sure that those labour market opinions were being used appropriately."

which of course entirely bypassed Tremonti's question about employers bypassing LMOs.

Meanwhile in February this year the BC Government Labour Market and Immigration Division was holding classes on how to do it :
(italics mine)

"Is your business experiencing a labour or skills shortage?

If you are an employer interested in learning how to use an alternative approach than the LMO process to recruit and retain foreign workers, this is your chance to find out directly from program staff. "

I guess the BC gov program staff is pretty good at it.
At the now cancelled April 2013 CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE, one of the listed presenters was 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, 
Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, 
whose CORE bio advertized provided "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

And a year ago, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation finalized a $22-million deal with iGATE to provide IT workers for its Road User Safety Modernization Initiative, the department in charge of "road user safety, provincial highways management, and transportation policy and planning including transit." 

Last month iGATE hired a lobbyist to lobby :

• Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)
• Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)
• Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC)
• Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC)
• Industry Canada (IC)
• Prime Minister's Office (PMO)
• Privy Council Office (PCO

on "the Temporary Foreign Workers Program and proposed government changes to the program."

We'll see how well they do with that.

Northern Reflections : One May Smile  and Smile

with files from : Boycott Royal Bank of Canada and Outsource Canada
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Update : Wednesday, May 8 :

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

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CORE-outsourcing/Amanda Lang/iGATE - on the milk carton

On Saturday I posted a screencap of CBC's 'senior business correspondent' Amanda Lang as keynote speaker at the upcoming CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing?.
CORE displayed Lang's bio above the logos of their 'Corporate Sponsors' - which unhappily included iGATE.  My link to that page subsequently went down over the weekend:








"Oops! The page you are looking for cannot be found."

This seemed most unlikely for an "annual global conference" about to open in 6 days so I fixed it. It went down again. Go ahead - try it yourself. It's gone.

CORE's helpful Oops! advice to try looking for the page in their menu links brings up no mention of the conference at all.                                                                                                                                                                 
    
                                                                         


Their most recent twitter entry on March 13 which provided a link to the conference is also "Oops", while links to it from various conference participants like Everest Group are also pining for the fjords.





The whole CORE-outsourcing April 23 conference page is all just one great big Oops now apparently.

In the course of looking for it, I ran into a CORE page from their 2011 conference advertizing Lang as the Conference Moderator :

as well as iGATE's proud corporate  sponsorship there in presumably happier days :

But the page at CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? , featuring Lang and C.J. Ritchie "Assistant Deputy Minister of the Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, which provides leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of strategic outsourcing contracts" is nowhere to be found.

Did they just go indoors?  Are they making corrections?  
All I know is that CBC has visited that Creekside page upwards of 20 times in the last 24 hours.

If anyone knows what happened, please let me know. After all - it's CORE's 8th Annual Outsourcing Conference - practically a Canadian tradition now.

2pm Update : Frank at Back of the Book found another way in :
http://www.core-outsourcing.org/events/event-directory/Archive/Conferenc2013/index.php

Thursday update from comments below :
Saskboy said : Ombudsman tweeted me that Lang is off the CORE event.

Mystery Solved !          CBC Ombudsman, May 3, 2013
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Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang - Part 4

 "Information technology workers displaced in Canada are being replaced not by cheap Indian workers but by better ones." 

So says CBC's Amanda Lang, senior business correspondent for CBC News and good cop to Kevin O'Leary's bad cop on the Lang and O'Leary Exchange, in yesterday's Globe and Mail.

She wonders if Canadians have returned to 1990 or perhaps to "campaign trail rhetoric in America" - so aghast is she that people are angry about the Royal Bank in-and-outsourcing of Canadian jobs to iGATE in India.  

In her rousing paeon to globalization and "the natural forces of capitalism", she explains :

"a job moved from Canada to India creates a new kind of prosperity. It creates a job in a country we sell goods and services to, increasing the opportunity for our businesses to flourish even more."

If you have $699.00 you can hear more of Amanda's thoughts when she gives the keynote address on April 23 at CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE :

"CORE's mandate is to help member organizations maximize the value of outsourcing by providing independent and unbiased information ... "

Also presenting will be 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, providing "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

A list of CORE's extensive corp members here, and no, Royal Bank isn't on that list including RBC Financial Group and you'll recognize the rest of them.  
In May, CORE is running a course focusing on "the transition from insourced service delivery to outsourced service delivery and through to steady-state operations".

About that...

Walkom : Former outsourcer describes how job destruction works.
Informative interview with a 10 year veteran of doing it in Canada.

But here's what I don't get, Amanda. If you bring in foreign workers in order to save money and drive down wages in Canada by paying those indentured foreign workers 15% less in a market that just lost 54,500 jobs last month, who is going to be able to to afford to buy the stuff and pay for the services you sent offshore?  

And who is going to look into fixing this for us? The same guy who set it up for us.

Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada - Part 1.  


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3


Sunday update : Great post from Laura K @ wmtc on related issues :
Unpaid labour used to be called slavery. Now it's an internship
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Wednesday update : CORE-outsourcing/Amanda Lang/ iGATE - on the milk carton
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Thursday update :
Saskboy said : Ombudsman tweeted me that Lang is off the CORE event.

May 3, 2013   CBC Ombudsman

March 5, 2014 CBC issues no foul no harm report :
Conflict of Interest and CBC News coverage of RBC and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program
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