The lease on an Albany warehouse holding fingerprint records and other personal information collected from 22 million people was about to expire, and the state needed to digitize the files.
The contract for the job required that employees responsible for scanning the records pass background checks and protect the security of the documents. Focused Technologies Imaging Services was awarded the $3.45 million contract in 2008. But according to the authorities, rather than fulfill its contract, it did what so many businesses have done in recent years: outsource the work to India. For the price of $82,000, an Indian company processed millions of records and performed more than a third of the entire contract’s work — risking the privacy of some 16 million people. Focused Technologies has agreed to pay $3.1 million in penalties and fees for defrauding the state and will submit to additional oversight for the next five years.
