The ELPAC Report June 2002

Cost of Bilingual Government?

Some anti-English advocates claim that there will be little or no cost to make American government multilingual. Observers have traditionally rejected that view, pointing to Canada's expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars for translations in just two languages.

Now the Internal Revenue Service has disclosed the cost of a state-of-the-art computer system designed to answer telephones in English or Spanish: $77 million. The system was installed by giant government contractor Computer Sciences Corporation in time for this year's tax filing season.

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