Nearly half the companies declined to discuss the issue at all, including giants like UnitedHealth Group, St. Paul Travelers Companies Inc, Best Buy Co Inc, 3M Co and Northwest Airlines Corp.

Yet in some cases it was still possible to determine whether unresponsive companies engaged in offshoring, thanks to information obtained from other sources, typically overseas sources.

UnitedHealth Group, for example, refused to comment. But the Indian editor of a BPO trade magazine said the second-largest U.S. health insurer was known to outsource work to a number of healthcare claims service providers, with the largest portion performed in Chennai, India at the sprawling 5,000-employee operation of Lason.

That company is one of the largest transaction processing BPO service providers in India, processing more than two billion records every month or more than 300,000 healthcare claims daily. It also claims to provide services to six of the top 20 U.S. insurance companies, a fourth of the top 20 U.S. retailers, nine of the top 17 credit-card-issuing U.S. banks and half of the top 12 mortgage loan originators in the United States.

Best Buy also declined to comment, possibly due to the announcement in March that it plans to lay off 300 employees at its Twin Cities headquarters despite consistently strong earnings results. But independently obtained info indicates the largest U.S. consumer electronics retailer has outsourced IT work for years, and more recently HR functions as well, to Accenture. A good proportion of that work could be performed in India, where Accenture's workforce has soared from just 1,200 in early 2003 to over 16,000 now, or 13 percent of its global labor force. That has enabled Accenture to become one of the world's largest BPO service providers.

Similar situations prevail at Xcel Energy Inc, Carlson Companies and Land-o-Lakes.

Xcel, which provides electricity to 1.4 million customers in Minnesota, said it did not offshore any back-office functions directly, but acknowledged outsourcing some unspecified operations to IBM. Pressed for details, Xcel suggested contacting IBM, which refused to comment. Like Accenture, IBM is one of the world's largest BPO service providers. Its workforce in India had already soared from 9,000 in 2004 to 43,000 before IBM said in June it plans to triple investment in India to $6 billion over the next three years. One publication said afterward the "I" in IBM should now stand for India, which has rapidly emerged as the company's second-largest operational base.

Carlson Companies also outsources work to IBM. In June 2005 the travel and hospitality giant announced "as part of an ongoing initiative to improve operations and remain globally competitive...entering negotiations to have IBM provide selected internal finance and IT services."

It estimated 300-400 jobs would be eliminated as a result. Sam Macalus, Carlson Companies' public relations director, said now only about 100 IT positions and 50 finance positions are expected to disappear. But Macalus would only address offshoring-related matters at the holding company level, and would not discuss whether any of the group operating units like the Radisson or Country Inns & Suites lodging chains or Carlson Wagonlit travel unit engaged in offshoring any back-office operations. Globally, the travel industry is one of the largest BPO customer segments.
Land-o-Lakes outsources work to a U.S. company which also increasingly performs the work in India.

The major dairy and food products producer outsources some HR functions to Hewitt, which is based in the Chicago suburb of Lincolnshire. But in recent years Hewitt, the world's second-largest HR services provider, has shifted ever more work to its burgeoning operations in India.
Medtronic Inc., Northwest Airlines Corp. and 3M all declined to comment.
Yet according to several local IT experts, Medtronic outsources at least IT development and maintenance work to India. And Northwest Airlines at one point shifted a 2,000-person flight information call center from Chisholm to India, according to Prakash Puram, a Twin Cities businessman and member of President George Bush's export advisory council. But in a subsequent development that demonstrates how more jobs are lost to technology than to offshoring, that service has since been almost totally automated, and an operation once performed by 5,000 staff in India is now overseen by just five Minnesota-based managers, Puram said.

3M also could be offshoring back-office operations, as it has built a large office facility in Gurgaon, the booming satellite city on the west side of Delhi, India. Another explosively growing satellite city to the east of Delhi, Noida, has transformed the Indian capital into the defacto capital of the global BPO industry. But 3M's Gurgaon facility might also be just a domestic or South Asian administration facility for the Minnesota-based manufacturer, which expects sales outside the U.S. to swell to 70 percent within five years.

Target Corp., by contrast, is a company known to be offshoring in a major way. The second-largest U.S. discount retailer wasn't actually contacted as part of this survey because its outsourcing activities are so visible. Target provides employment to about 3,500 IT workers, just half of whom are permanent staff. About 1,800 software programmers and engineers are contract workers, most employees of India's five largest IT service companies -- Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant and Satyam Computer. Target also outsources its call center operations to the Seattle-based company vCustomer, whose major operational facilities are located in India and Mexico.

Eagan-based Westlaw, a leading provider of legal databases and reference materials, confirmed it does not offshore anything. The company, which employs about 5,800 staff at its suburban St. Paul headquarters, confirmed it briefly experimented in 2004 with hiring a small group of lawyers in Bombay, India to help with the work of summarizing U.S. court judgments, and coding them thoroughly and correctly for reference. But Denis Hauptly,

Westlaw's vice president for litigation product development, said the operation was soon terminated, proving an oft-overlooked aspect of offshoring: that while many business processes can be offshored technologically, many prove unsuitable for offshoring for operational and practical reasons.

"It really wasn't a fit for our business," Hauptly said. "We looked at the operations that we have housed here and the level of expertise that we have here, and I think everybody decided that the best thing to do was to keep that operation right where it is. It's world class."

Four other companies confirmed they offshore nothing, and hurried to say so. Companies that don't offshore often like to trumpet that fact. This group included Supervalu Inc, Piper Jaffray Companies, and two companies that tout their appearance on high-profile lists of America's best companies to work for -- Ecolab Inc. and General Mills Inc.

"We just have not done that, give an entire operation to a third-party vendor," said Tom Forsythe, General Mills' vice president for corporate communications. General Mills, listed by Fortune magazine as one of the 100 best places to work, does business in over 100 countries and employs 27,000 workers -- 16,000 in the U.S. and 11,000 abroad. Yet despite its global sprawl, General Mills administers every aspect of its business empire internally, putting high value on internal staff development.

"There is value to developing expertise inhouse," said Forsythe. In particular, Forsythe said the do-it-yourself approach insures superior staff loyalty, retention and performance.

Forsythe points to a story published in the Wall Street Journal as evidence of how certain functions just can't be outsourced or offshored without hurting performance. The story describes how a General Mills' call center employee, Linda Leopold, helped a caller find a long-lost recipe so the woman could make a special dish for her dying father. Leopold found the recipe even though the caller could recollect only a partial list of ingredients.

General Mills has all its call centers in North America -- in Minneapolis; Peoria, Illinois; and Montreal, Canada. "Some calls from the U.S. are handled by Montreal, and some Canadian calls are handled in the U.S. But that is a simple volume management function," Forsythe said.

Ecolab also operates in over 70 countries and employs more than 22,000 workers worldwide. Yet the $4.5 billion company, which appears on the 2005 Forbes magazine list of America's "Best Managed Companies," offshores nothing. All aspects of administering its U.S. operations are done from facilities in Minnesota, North Dakota and North Carolina, said Mike Monahan, corporate vice president for external relations. And its operations in other countries and regions are run along the same lines.

"Billing and credit for Japan are done in Japan," said Monahan. HR policies are set centrally, but administered regionally or country by country. There's nothing that's been outsourced."