Same Position. Same Worker's Name. A New "Competitive" Contract Every Year.

Finding One: The Original Filter Missed Nearly a Third of the Money

The staff-augmentation report scoped its contract search to Subject LIKE '%staff aug%' — a reasonable filter for a statewide survey, but one that misses every contract Texas labeled "ITSAC" or "DIR ITSAC" instead of "staff aug." Those are the same arrangement — IT staff augmentation task orders issued under Texas DIR's statewide multiple-award contract — just a different subject-line convention. Pulling every contract for these four vendors regardless of subject line, the totals move substantially:

One honest caveat on Prelude's number: $5,846,500 of its $23.79M corrected total is a single 2014 contract ("DBITS-BIP Workflow CoE") that is a discrete IT project, not a recurring staffing-renewal arrangement like the rest of this dataset — excluding it, Prelude's staffing-pattern total is $17.95M, still 52% above the original figure. All other corrections above are apples-to-apples staffing/ITSAC task orders.

Finding Two: The Paperwork Names the Position — and Sometimes the Worker

Texas's own contract records embed more detail than the top-line numbers suggest. Many "staff aug"/"ITSAC" contract subject lines follow a consistent pattern: an internal tracking number, the fiscal year, a state-assigned position ID prefixed Pos#, and — in the majority of cases — a fragment of the contracted worker's own name, e.g. "278674-FY25AUG Pos#C010931 Gon..." or "FY26AUGR Pos#51079 Saleman, Be..." (subject fields are truncated in the state's own export). That's already worth flagging on its own: Texas's public procurement records for these contracts are not fully anonymized at the individual level, something worth keeping in mind for how this data gets handled going forward. This report identifies workers only by the same truncated name fragments the state's own records already expose, and only in service of tracking a position ID across contracts — not to make any claim about a specific individual's immigration status, which this data cannot establish.

What that position-ID field lets you do is track whether the "same job" gets rebid or just renewed. Searching for repeated Pos# values across separate fiscal-year contract awards turned up two clean matches, both at the same agency:

The Steck/Pos#51079 pair is the tightest evidence in the dataset: one fiscal year apart, same position number, same worker surname, both filed as new "Competitive" contracts rather than one continuous engagement. Read alongside the M9/Pos#C010931 pair — one year apart, same position, same surname, same agency — this isn't a one-company anomaly. It's the same mechanism showing up at two separate vendors.

Why "Competitive" Doesn't Mean What It Sounds Like Here

This isn't a procurement-fraud story — it's a naming-convention story with real transparency consequences. Texas DIR runs a statewide, multiple-award Information Technology Staff Augmentation Contract (ITSAC) program: a pool of pre-qualified vendors compete once, at the master-agreement level, to get onto the list. After that, individual agencies draw down specific staffing positions from that pool as task orders — and Texas's own contract-tracking system records each task order as a discrete new contract, tagged with the same "Procurement Method: Competitive" label as a genuinely re-bid, openly solicited award. When the same position gets refilled by the same contractor's same worker a year or three later, the state's own data has no way to distinguish that from an actual competitive rebid — both look identical in the export: a new contract number, a new award date, "Competitive." The label is technically accurate to the ITSAC program's structure and functionally misleading to anyone reading the contract list looking for how often Texas actually reopens these positions to competition.

What Didn't Show The Pattern — And Why That's Not the Same As Clean

We ran the same check against the other two flagged vendors and came up empty — but for two different, non-exculpatory reasons.

Prelude Systems Inc only tags 4 of its 92 Texas contracts with the Pos# convention at all; the rest use generic subjects like "DIR IT Staffing Services" that don't carry a trackable position ID. No repeats turned up among those 4 — but that's a sample too small to draw a conclusion from, not evidence the pattern is absent.

Indotronix International Corp. uses no Pos# convention across any of its 35 Texas contracts — every subject line is generic ("IT Staffing," "DIR ITSAC," "Temporary Staffing"). This method simply can't test Indotronix's contracts one way or the other; a different records request (the underlying task-order documentation, not just the ESBD contract-list export) would be needed to check whether the same positions recur there too.

The Four Vendors, Side By Side

*Nationwide LCA filings are this report's own count: matched to each vendor by EMPLOYER_NAME across DOL's 2020-2026 disclosure tables, deduplicated by case number. This is a narrower matching method than the original report's (which also checked SECONDARY_ENTITY_BUSINESS_NAME for staffing-agency placements in 2025-2026 data), so these totals and percentages will not match that report's figures exactly — both are legitimate reads of imperfectly-matched government data, and the discrepancy is itself a reminder that vendor-name matching against LCA data is inherently approximate.

One pattern holds across all four: HHSC is every vendor's largest Texas customer, by a wide margin in three of the four cases. Whatever is driving these vendors' concentration in H-1B-dependent staffing, it's concentrated inside one agency's IT organization more than any other part of Texas government.

Texas Is Becoming a Bigger Share of These Vendors' H-1B Business Over Time

For both vendors where the position-recycling pattern is confirmed, Texas's share of their national H-1B filing volume has climbed sharply over the six years of data available:

Year reflects the LCA table's filing-year cohort; 2026 is a partial year of data. Small yearly denominators (12-38 filings/year for these two vendors) mean single-digit filing-count swings move the percentage substantially — read the direction of the trend, not the precision of any one year's figure.

Texas state government isn't a side line of business for either of these two companies anymore — it's an increasingly central one, at the same time the position-recycling pattern shows some of that Texas business isn't turning over the workforce so much as re-badging it.

Investigative Assessment

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