Every vendor below appears in both the OAG’s own contract records and DOL’s H-1B LCA disclosure data under a matching legal name, city, and state — not just a similar-sounding name (see methodology note below for why that distinction mattered). Five of the top eight are Austin-based, walking distance from the agency they contracted with.

This is every contract in the broader staffing/temporary-personnel/”ITSAC” family at OAG — WorkQuest and the confirmed H-1B vendors combined — not just the H-1B-linked subset above. It answers a question our first pass at this data got wrong: a keyword-only search on the word “staff” made it look like this spending collapsed after 2017. It didn’t. The office simply renamed the line item to “ITSAC” and “Temporary Personnel Services” around 2018 and kept contracting at scale.

A name-only match between a state contract vendor and an H-1B filer is not proof they’re the same company — and this dataset had two clean examples of why. “Capitol Consulting Services,” an OAG vendor paid $798,509 across 5 contracts, superficially matched an H-1B filer called “First Capitol Consulting, Inc.” — but that company is based in Los Angeles with no apparent Texas connection, and the name isn’t actually the same. We excluded it. Separately, a substring search for “National Human Resource Group” (an OAG vendor) turned up “International Human Resources Development Corporation” purely because “national” is contained inside “international” — an unrelated Boston nonprofit. Every vendor in the confirmed total above was checked individually against the H-1B filer’s registered city and state, not matched on name text alone.

The Texas Attorney General’s office — the state’s chief law-enforcement agency, responsible for enforcing Texas’s own labor and employment laws — has spent nearly $27 million of public money since 2015 on contracts with staffing vendors that are themselves active H-1B sponsors, and the arrangement is still running today. This isn’t a claim that any of these contracts were improperly awarded; OAG’s procurement records show the bulk went through competitive bidding. It’s a claim about where the money actually ends up: when a state agency outsources “IT staff augmentation” to a vendor, it isn’t hiring Texans directly, and in at least 14 of these vendor relationships, it’s contracting with firms that source a meaningful share of their technical labor through the guest-worker visa system — on the state’s own dime, inside the very office that is supposed to be Texas’s watchdog on these issues.