TVA work outsourced to India under fire

TVA Chairman Glenn McCullough Jr. told Duncan, a Knoxville Republican, that the agency will re-evaluate whether to keep the two technical services contracts, which Duncan pointed out during a routine TVA operations hearing by the House water resources subcommittee in Washington on Thursday.

Duncan, who is chairman of the subcommittee, said he was alerted to the practice of using Indian workers for TVA jobs when he read about it in The Knoxville News Sentinel.

“I don’t believe that any federal agency should be sending work to China, India or any other place” overseas, Duncan told the newspaper in an interview. “There’s other, better ways to save money, especially in this economic atmosphere, with all the concerns about jobs.”

A McCullough spokesman said that TVA, which this week announced a voluntary severance plan to reduce jobs, has no intention of laying off any of its workers because of the work being done in India.

Spokesman Gil Francis said the contracts involve converting paper engineering drawings, mostly about the agency’s coal-fired power plants, to a computer format that allows changes in designs. An undisclosed amount of the work is going to India.

TVA, a federally chartered corporation funded solely through the sale of electricity in seven Southeastern states, has paid about $2 million on the contracts since 1998 to two U.S. firms chosen from among nine applicants, Francis said.

The two, both minority-owned companies, are Access Systems International Inc. of New York and ValueCAD of Portland, Ore., he said.

Calvin Underwood, president of TVA’s Engineering Association, disclosed earlier this week that TVA had in the past awarded contracts to domestic companies that outsourced some of the work to India.

TVA could not determine Thursday how many U.S. and Indian workers are involved in the two main service contracts and a subcontract.

When the contracts were let initially, TVA considered two contract proposals from firms in its service region. Their costs ranged from 24 percent to 76 percent higher than the selected firms, TVA says.

Whether the offshore contracts are having any effect or not, TVA is undoubtedly trying to reduce its work force. It has offered financial incentives for a portion of its 13,000 workers to retire or resign. If an insufficient number of employees take the early out, layoffs would follow. Those will be announced April 22, TVA has said.

TVA, the nation’s largest public utility, provides electricity to 8.3 million consumers in Tennessee and parts of North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

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Tennessee Valley Authority: http://www.tva.gov