Assigning billing work overseas to BPO companies

Assigning biling work overseas to BPO companies
 
This is a topic of concern to many US companies, particularly small ones who have less control.  It is nice being a big company.  You can set up huge offices anywhere in the world, get business licenses anywhere and your attorneys will do the work for you.  You can have your head office in the Caymen Islands where there is no corporate tax.  You have a lot of freedom being big.  But, for the rest of us, we do not have these luxuries.  We are at the mercy of who works for us.
 
There are many companies that hire overseas BPO companies to do their billing and credit card transactions.  It is common.  For the most part, it is business as usual.  Americans are always fearful that people in a foreign country will be more likely to cheat them, but I feel that you need to look at countries one by one. India and the Philippines do most of the BPO outsourcing in the world, and there are only scandals from time to time, and perhaps not that many more scandals than their equivalents in the United States.  I don’t have the data.  If you hire a reliable company, all it takes is one bad individual (or apple as we say over here), to spoil the bunch.  One bad employee can commit serious fraud involving credit cards, and ruin a whole company’s reputation and cost them millions. That bad guy could be anywhere. He could be in India, or Canada, or who knows where.
 
If you are in Nevada, and hire a company in Nevada to do work for you, you can have a contract, and you can sue them if they violate the contract.  If you are in Nevada and hire an Indian BPO company to do work for you, it is not so easy to sue them.  For that matter, if you are in India, it is not easy to sue someone in India due to the inefficient legal system.
 
To keep the trust of your clients, if you are a smaller company, you might be better off having your billing done domestically rather than hiring an Indian BPO, and preferably by a trusted staff member.  I would not have billing done by anyone you have worked with for less than a year if at all possible. There is a lot to lose here!