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Suncorp Group is the latest financial services company to announce redundancies, by sending 65 accounting positions to India.

Finance Sector Union (FSU) national secretary Leon Carter said two thirds of the positions would come from Brisbane and the remainder NSW.

Mr Carter said Suncorp had now moved 203 jobs offshore in the past six months, including 50 roles in claims, 17 in Suncorp Business Services, 71 roles in personal insurance and 65 roles in accounting.

"Suncorp's offshoring program appears to be gaining pace with the company announcing another 65 jobs will head to India in 2012," Mr Carter said in a statement.

The FSU says some of the affected staff are involved in compiling the insurance and banking company's half yearly and annual reports.

The redundancies announced on Wednesday came a fortnight after Suncorp confirmed 71 roles would be sent offshore.

"At this rate, employment opportunities for the next generation of finance workers will be severely limited," Mr Carter said.

A Suncorp spokeswoman said many employees felt "really burnt" after putting in long hours to assist Queensland flood victims with insurance claims last year.

While Suncorp would not reveal the exact number of redundancies, a spokeswoman said some staff would be offered other roles within the company.

She said the 65 positions quoted by FSU did not consider "immediate redeployment" and "expression of interest opportunities".

"We expect that the net number of roles impacted will likely be around 40," she said.

"We are currently in consultation with the impacted employees regarding our intention to engage a partner company to undertake some of our back office accounting functions.

"Our preference is to redeploy these people across the group, where possible."

She said the group anticipates its employee base will decline over the medium term.

On Tuesday Macquarie Group said it planned to cut 10 per cent of its investment banking jobs and last week Westpac briefed workers about 410 job cuts and positions it would relocate to India as part of a group-wide restructure.

FSU figures released in January showed National Australia Bank, ANZ Banking Group, Westpac and Commonwealth Bank collectively made 3,309 roles redundant in 2011.

Suncorp shares were up 29 cents at $8.47 on Wednesday.

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Suncorp to send 65 more jobs offshore: FSU

Suncorp Group is the latest financial services company to announce redundancies, by sending 65 accounting positions to India.

Finance Sector Union (FSU) national secretary Leon Carter said two thirds of the positions would come from Brisbane and the remainder NSW.

Mr Carter said Suncorp had now moved 203 jobs offshore in the past six months, including 50 roles in claims, 17 in Suncorp Business Services, 71 roles in personal insurance and 65 roles in accounting.

'Suncorp's offshoring program appears to be gaining pace with the company announcing another 65 jobs will head to India in 2012,' Mr Carter said in a statement.

The FSU says some of the affected staff are involved in compiling the insurance and banking company's half yearly and annual reports.

The redundancies announced on Wednesday came a fortnight after Suncorp confirmed 71 roles would be sent offshore.

'At this rate, employment opportunities for the next generation of finance workers will be severely limited,' Mr Carter said.

A Suncorp spokeswoman said many employees felt 'really burnt' after putting in long hours to assist Queensland flood victims with insurance claims last year.

While Suncorp would not reveal the exact number of redundancies, a spokeswoman said some staff would be offered other roles within the company.

She said the 65 positions quoted by FSU did not consider 'immediate redeployment' and 'expression of interest opportunities'.

'We expect that the net number of roles impacted will likely be around 40,' she said.

'We are currently in consultation with the impacted employees regarding our intention to engage a partner company to undertake some of our back office accounting functions.

'Our preference is to redeploy these people across the group, where possible.'

She said the group anticipates its employee base will decline over the medium term.

On Tuesday Macquarie Group said it planned to cut 10 per cent of its investment banking jobs and last week Westpac briefed workers about 410 job cuts and positions it would relocate to India as part of a group-wide restructure.

FSU figures released in January showed National Australia Bank, ANZ Banking Group, Westpac and Commonwealth Bank collectively made 3,309 roles redundant in 2011.

At 1527 AEDT Suncorp shares were 30 cents, or 3.7 per cent, higher at $8.48.

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Suncorp to send 65 more jobs offshore

February 09, 2012, 6:53 AM EST

By Steven Sloan

Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service are providing additional guidance to offshore banks on how to comply with a tax withholding requirement for some of their U.S. clients.

The proposed regulations will reduce the burdens on overseas banks by allowing them to use information they already collect to comply with due diligence requirements, the Treasury said in a press release today. The proposal will also adjust the withholding requirement’s implementation schedule and expand the range of financial institutions that won’t have to enter into formal agreements with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, implements a 2010 law that Congress passed to discourage offshore tax evasion. It requires overseas banks to make withholdings from U.S. clients who fail to disclose enough identifying information to the IRS.

--Editors: Jodi Schneider, Steven Komarow

To contact the reporter on this story: Steven Sloan in Washington at ssloan7@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jodi Schneider at jschneider50@bloomberg.net

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U.S. Seeks to Ease Offshore Bank Compliance Rules

It began as a trickle last year. There was the odd announcement detailing cutbacks and job losses at companies like CSR and SPC before steelmaker BlueScope announced massive losses, the closure of a major section of its Port Kembla facility and 1000 retrenchments.

Less than six weeks into the new year and the drip, while not quite a deluge, certainly has become far more serious.

A host of corporations, all facing tough trading conditions, has been lining up to deliver the bad news. Manufacturers, led by each of the three auto-makers, have been labouring under the yoke of a record Australian dollar that has made them uncompetitive. The price of imported cars has dropped while export markets have dried up.

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As the political furore over emergency packages gathered heat, the smooth-talking head of GM Holden confided that governments around the world ''support'' their automobile industries. Without it, the message seemed, there would be no Australian auto industry.

Other industries, however, don't seem to engender the same kind of political support.

Aluminium maker Alcoa Australia this week confessed that it may have to close one of its two Victorian plants, at Point Henry, threatening the livelihoods of 600 workers. Again the company cited the strength of the currency along with the distressed state of the global aluminium market. The company is unable to compete.

In between, there has been a steady stream of dire warnings and pink slips from our financial institutions, capped off by a confession from Macquarie Group this week it had shed 1000 jobs in the past year with more to come.

While circumstances unique to each company often play a role in these decisions, it is clear that several forces have begun to take effect that will permanently reshape our economy and our roles within it.

The demise of our manufacturing industry is a familiar tale of steady decline, one that has been well-documented since the 1960s and a trend that now appears to be accelerating.

But it remains one of the nation's biggest employers of skilled and unskilled labour and each factory closure comes attached with an enormous degree of individual pain that has the potential to spill over into the political arena, something rarely mentioned in the economics textbooks.

It gradually is becoming clear just how painful the ''economic adjustment'' now under way within our economy could become. For while a stronger currency bequeaths greater wealth upon us all, through increased spending power, it's no real help if you're unemployed.

Up until around 2007, our economy was evolving in a fairly predictable and traditional manner. From Federation in 1901, rural employment gave way to a rise in manufacturing. And from the 1970s, as protection levels were reduced, manufacturing was overtaken by service industries.

In the mid-1990s, manufacturing was still the dominant contributor to the economy, accounting for 15 per cent of gross domestic product. But in the decade up until 2007, it declined to 12 per cent and it has been shrinking ever since as around 100,000 jobs have evaporated in the past three years.

Nevertheless, according to the latest statistics, just under 1 million Australians still are employed in the sector with the vast bulk in NSW and Victoria.

Those declines were largely offset by the growth in the services sector, which in the decade to 2007 grew from 10 per cent of our economy to 14.5 per cent.

A large proportion of those new service jobs sprang up in the business and property areas, more skilled and better paid. Australia was showing all the signs of a country that was growing up and an economy that was maturing.

The American experience was far different. Between 2001 and 2010, 42,000 factories closed and 5.5 million manufacturing jobs (about one-third of the total) disappeared. But the high-end jobs were not created to anywhere near the same extent.

There's no prizes for guessing where most of those jobs went. China, with its heavily manipulated and artificially depressed currency, now makes more cars than the US and Japan combined.

Those trends now are accelerating as Australia's transition to global quarry gathers pace. And it is no longer simply affecting our manufacturing. Increasingly, more complex service jobs are being sent offshore. That trend will gather pace within the next decade, driven by two fundamental forces.

The first is the changing nature of the developing economies themselves. As the middle class in China and India and other Asian nations swells, the number of highly trained graduates will grow exponentially. The offspring of factory workers, they will be no longer be content to work on car assembly lines and in clothing factories.

They will be providing information technology and business skills. And they will be available to sell those skills on an international market, thanks to the emergence of a second fundamental force - high-speed broadband.

Until now, India and the Philippines have been the major beneficiaries of the Australian trend to import business services, mostly through lowly-paid call centre work.

But once the National Broadband Network is constructed, the capacity for Australian business to import a vast array of skilled services from emerging Asian economies will be limited only by the imagination.

Already, this has begun to emerge.

Macquarie Group's chief financial officer, Greg Ward, this week outlined a trend that is bound to be replicated by others in the banking world.

In 2008, Macquarie had about 100 people working in ''low-cost jurisdictions'', offering support services in areas such as technology, human resources, finance and business services. Those numbers have swelled to 1000.

While some may argue Macquarie is an atypical example, given it has been under siege ever since the financial crisis first gripped global banking four years ago, it merely has been forced to look harder for greater savings. The others will follow.

Westpac's recent announcement that it would lay off 560 employees hinted that a large number of more highly-skilled jobs will be sent offshore. One pessimistic report last month suggested that up to 7000 workers in the financial services sector could find themselves out of a job within the next few years.

While the enormous capital influx into our resources sector has provided us with windfall gains and lifted our living standards, it also has the power to unleash powerful forces upon Australian society in the next few years.

Given it is a highly mechanised industry, not all those being laid off in manufacturing and services will be absorbed into this lucrative new growth sector. And therein lies a challenge for our politicians.

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Broadband to speed trend of sending service jobs offshore

NEW YORK (AP) — Investors thinking of buying a piece of Facebook after it goes public are hoping it will perform like Google, whose stock has risen 500 percent since its debut seven and a half years ago.

But they may want to spare a thought for companies slightly less exciting — a truck leasing company, perhaps, or a manufacturer of ball bearings.

Stocks of those two have left Google, and the investors who didn't get into it early, in the dust in the past several years. So have more than half the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index.

Since the stock market peaked on Oct. 9, 2007, Ryder System Inc., which rents moving trucks, has returned 26 percent, counting dividends. Timken, the ball bearing company, 49 percent.

And the staid Johnson & Johnson, the 125-year-old maker of Tucks ointment to relieve hemorrhoids among thousands of other products, has trounced Google, too — returning 12 percent with dividends.

Google is up more than most stocks if you pick a different starting point, like 2004. But measured from the market peak, it's down 1.5 percent. In other words, the people who got in then still haven't broken even — four and half years later.

Even Microsoft, the lumbering software company whose best days are widely considered behind it, has done better, returning 12 percent, counting dividends.

The lesson is that when it comes to hot stocks, you can sit on losses for years if you happen to buy at the top and can't make up ground with dividend checks.

"They move like rockets, straight up," says Robert Russell, president of Russell & Co., a wealth management company in Ohio. "But they can fall back to earth, too."

In a filing earlier this month, Facebook said it plans to sell a yet-unknown stake for $5 billion, the largest for an Internet company's initial public offering. The buzz is that the offering could value the whole company at as much as $100 billion — more than Hewlett-Packard, AOL and Yahoo combined.

Whether the newly public stock — ticker symbol FB — will prove profitable for investors is another matter.

For a taste of the dangers of buying stock in companies in the spotlight, check out the performance of Internet IPOs last year. You've done OK if you got in at the offering price, set before the stock starts trading. But that's mostly reserved for the favored customers — pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds and other institutions. The little guy isn't doing nearly as well.

After sharp rises on the first day of trading, most stocks have fallen. That's true for Groupon Inc., the online daily deals site, Pandora Media Inc., an Internet radio operator, and the consumer reviews site Angie's List Inc.

Even the online professional network LinkedIn Corp., a stock that surged Friday on news of unexpected big quarterly profits, is down 4.6 percent from its IPO close.

In hindsight, people looking to strike it rich should have stuck with the IPOs of companies more obscure, like fertilizer maker CVR Partners. Since its public debt in April, the company, which sells nitrogen fertilizer to farmers from a factory in Kansas, is up 77 percent.

Its lucky owners also get something those of pie-in-the-sky Internet outfits can only dream about — dividends. CVR is expected to send checks to its shareholders over the next year of $2 per share, or 8 percent of its stock price even after the big run-up.

As it turns out, dividends have played a role in other recent triumphs of the boring over the bedazzling.

During the stock market swoon from Oct. 2007 to March 2009, Johnson & Johnson stock fell only half as much as Google. That's because J&J still has a fat 3.5 percent dividend yield. Google doesn't pay a dividend.

Those checks in the mail helped on the way up, too. Without dividends, J&J would have lost 2 percent since the market peak instead of returning 12 percent. Microsoft would be up just 2 percent instead of 12 percent.

Those companies can pay dividends because they make big profits, another thing lacking at many Internet companies. Internet bulls don't seem to be bothered, preferring to focus on sales. The idea is if you grow them fast, profits will come naturally.

But investors can lose patience waiting.

On Wednesday, Groupon announced that it had tripled revenue last quarter providing deals on restaurant meals, hotel stays, manicures and the like. No matter. The company also said it hadn't turned a profit — not yet at least. Its stock fell 14 percent.

Facebook is already profitable, but not enough to justify that top-end value of $100 billion. At that lofty height, the company would trade at 145 times what it earned in 2011. The S&P 500 is trading at 15 times last year's profits.

So investors are talking about Facebook's almost $3.7 billion in sales last year, which helps justify the value a bit more, maybe. At $100 billion, Facebook stock would be trading at 27 times sales. LinkedIn is trading at 20 times and Google at five.

We'd all be rich, of course, if picking stocks was just a matter of checking sales multiples or dividend yields or any other simple gauge. Apple doesn't pay a dividend, for instance, but that didn't stop it from rising. Facebook could indeed become the next Apple.

But when it comes to investing, you could do worse than avoiding exciting new businesses in the headlines and putting your money instead into tired old ones you never see articles about, and wouldn't care to read if you did.

Like a company hawking deep fryers.

National Presto Industries makes Big Daddy fryers and other kitchen gadgets as well as what's delicately called "incontinence products," better known as adult diapers. It's run out of a cinderblock converted World War II munitions factory in Eau Claire, Wis., by Maryjo Cohen, a woman so frugal she refused for years to fly anything but coach on business trips, upgrade from Microsoft Office 97 on her computer or replace the Eisenhower-era iron desks at headquarters.

Better to save money for dividends, which the company has been paying for 67 years. That's 40 years before the birth of Mark Zuckerberg, the hoodie-wearing Facebook CEO.

Cohen prefers sensible skirts and blouses but somehow has managed to lift Presto stock up 90 percent above where it was trading at the stock market peak. With dividends, it's returned 157 percent.

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As Facebook IPO nears, the case for dull stocks