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(Salt Lake City-AP) -- State officials are asking the contractor that handles Utah welfare calls to begin fielding them on U-S soil.
The private company called eFunds closed its Wisconsin call center which fielded questions from Utah's welfare recipients and now the calls are routed to a call center in India.
Angry Utah residents have complained about state services being performed by foreign workers when there's a job shortage in the U-S. Some states have even introduced legislation to ban outsourcing of jobs overseas, though Utah is not one of them.
A spokesman for the Department of Workforce Services says he's asked eFunds to do a complete analysis to have the calls returned somehow to the U-S.
But he says most of the work done by eFunds is done in the U-S and only a small portion is done in India.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
