Satyam's Fraudulent "Maquiladora of the Mind"

It was only a few years ago that a group of offshore outsourcing
companies based in India seemed poised to take over a large portion of
the U.S. economy. Business propagandists insisted that work ranging
from low-level data input to skilled professional work such as
financial analysis could be done faster and much cheaper by workers
hunched over computer terminals in cities such as Bangalore. The New York Times once described one of these offshoring companies as "a maquiladora of the mind."

Among the most aggressive of the Indian firms was Satyam Computer
Services Ltd., which signed up blue-chip clients such as Ford Motor,
Merrill Lynch, Texas Instruments and Yahoo. In a 2004 report
I wrote for the U.S. high-tech workers organization WashTech, I found
that Satyam was also among the offshoring companies that were doing
work for state government agencies. It was hired, for example, as a
subcontractor by the U.S. company Healthaxis to develop a system for
handling applications for medical insurance services provided by the
Washington State Health Care Authority. As it turned out, Healthaxis's
contract was terminated, allegedly because of late delivery and poor
quality in the work done by Satyam.

The Washington State fiasco may have been an early omen of things to come. Satyam has just admitted that for years it cooked its books and engaged in widespread financial wrongdoing. The revelation came in a letter
sent to the company's board of directors by Satyam founder and chairman
B. Ramalinga Raju (photo), who simultaneously tendered his resignation.

Raju wrote that what started as "a marginal gap between actual
operating profit and the one reflected in the books" eventually
"attained unmanageable proportions" as the company grew. The fictitious
cash balance grew to more than US$1 billion. "It was like riding a
tiger," Raju colorfully wrote, "not knowing how to get off without
being eaten."

While admitting that he engaged in very creative accounting, Raju
insisted he did not personally benefit from the fraud, denying for
instance that he had sold any of his shares in the company. I guess it
is meant to be some consolation that among his sins Raju is not guilty
of insider trading.

Apart from Raju, the party most on the hot seat is the company's
auditor, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, whose Indian unit gave Satyam's
financial reports a clean bill of health.
The Satyam scandal is being called India's Enron. It should probably
also be called India's Arthur Andersen as this seems to be another case
in which an auditor was either oblivious to widespread accounting
misconduct by one of its clients or complicit in it.

Some soul-searching is probably also in order for the many large
U.S. corporations that have not hesitated to take jobs away from
American workers and ship the work off to Indian companies such as
Satyam. The revelation that much of the work has been going to a
crooked company is all the more galling.

http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/297

Dirt Diggers Digest is written by Philip Mattera, director of the Corporate Research Project, an affiliate of Good Jobs First.

• 185 Corruption
• 186 Financial Services, Insurance and Banking