Farmout Call Center Philippines and Accredited Call Center Philippines Trainers

Farmout is pleased to note that BOI has approved our request to have the terms and conditions of our BOI Certificate REg no 2005-168 from :

“The ITH incentives shall be limited only to the revenues generated from this Call Center activity”

To:

“The ITH incentives shall be limited only to the revenues generated from the ICT enabled services”

This effectively allows our Philippine call center operations to offer more services and still be covered by the terms of the Board of Investments

Our Training Center Administrator, Ms Yvette Pascual reports:

The following FOCI graduates are offered a job or are currently working in various Philippine call centers: 

Source: ZDNet

Telemarketers will have to abide by a national Do Not Call register in 2007, after the federal government announced it would soon introduce legislation to protect consumers.

The register would establish national minimum contact standards for telemarketers, on matters such as permitted calling hours, minimum information requirements and termination of calls.

The standards would apply to all telemarketers in Australia and overseas telemarketers representing Australian companies.

“A Do Not Call register, open to individuals and small businesses, will enable people to opt out from receiving unsolicited telemarketing calls,” said the minister for the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), senator Helen Coonan.

“Once a telephone number is registered, it will be prohibited for telemarketers to contact that number.

“However, in recognition of the need for some organisations with underlying public interest objectives to make unsolicited calls, a limited range of exemptions will apply, for example, to charity groups and people undertaking social research.

“Exemptions will also apply to companies with an existing business relationship with an individual, for example with existing accounts or contracts.”

The register would cost over AU$33 million to establish, according to the government. Of this, the government would contribute AU$17.2 million, with the remainder to be met by industry.

Individuals and small businesses would not have to pay to register their telephone numbers, the government said.

However, telemarketers would contribute to the costs by the payment of subscription fees to access the register.

The government expects one million registrations in the first week of the register’s operation and four million after its first year.

SOX in this case refers to Sarbanes-Oxley. In a BusinessWeek article :

Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is the corporate equivalent of root canal. Big public companies spent thousands of hours and an average of $4.4 million apiece last year to make sure that someone was looking over the shoulder of key accounting personnel at every step of every business process, according to Financial Executives International (FEI). Designed to nip accounting problems in the bud before they blossom into fraud, Section 404 is a core provision of the 2002 corporate-reform law. The number of companies that disclosed serious chinks in their internal accounting controls jumped to 586 in the first four months of 2005, compared with 313 for all of 2004, according to Glass, Lewis & Co., a financial research firm.

How did this come about? An article in New Yorker explains it thoroughly:

In the summer of 2002, with the stock market tumbling and fraud at Enron and WorldCom dominating the headlines, there was immense political pressure on Washington to restore investor confidence by doing something about corporate crime. Scrambling to deflect charges of indifference to the plight of widows whose 401(k)s had vanished, Congress hastily wrote and passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (dubbed SarbOx), a tough piece of anti-fraud legislation. A Republican-dominated Congress might have been expected to oppose costly business regulations, but politics made SarbOx a thoroughly bipartisan affair. The bill passed unanimously in the Senate, and, when President Bush signed it into law, he proclaimed the end of an “era of low standards and false profits.”

“Washington’s pride in SarbOx, though, was not universally shared. Businesses hated the complexity of the new rules (which, among other things, required corporate executives to certify all the financial results of their companies). Economists fastened on the inefficiency of many of the law’s provisions. Stephen Moore, the founder of the Club for Growth, recently called the law “a new cancer,” and the former chief financial officer of GlaxoSmithKline deplored it as an “American nightmare.” SarbOx, the argument now goes, is a classic example of government overreaction. Its heavy costs outweigh its meagre benefits, standing in the way of the market’s efficient allocation of capital. The Securities and Exchange Commission is now talking about loosening enforcement of the regulations, while lobbyists are pushing Congress to revise the bill in the year ahead.”

The new requirements by the US Government by way of SOX may open up new avenues of service offerings by outsourcing firms. Although some sectors (Ideablog) are now arguing that the social cost of SOX may NOT outweigh the benefits, in this article

 “I have a number of problems with the argument.  First, while the article does offer empirical support for the social costs of corporate fraud point, it offers no empirical support for the conclusion that the benefits of SOX outweigh the costs of SOX.  Second, it assumes that SOX would have prevented the fraud at WorldCom.  Third, it fails to discuss how the social costs of SOX, including the loss of market value to firms following enactment, SOX’s disproportionate impact on small companies”

Š