Xerox is cutting 139 jobs in Henderson

Xerox Business Services, which in January announced plans for a round of layoffs in Cary, is laying off an additional 139 workers in Henderson.

The company notified the state Commerce Department last week that the layoffs at its Xerox State Healthcare site in Henderson were triggered by “a change in business conditions.”

The layoffs, which take effect May 31, will leave Xerox with about 320 employees in Henderson.

“Unfortunately, due to a business decision of a single client, we are making the necessary yet difficult decision to reduce our workforce,” Xerox spokesman Kevin Lightfoot wrote in an e-mail. “This decision impacts one specific business unit at our facility and is not associated with Xerox’s previously announced decision to separate into two independent companies.”

Employees whose jobs are eliminated will be provided with job-search assistance and also will be able to apply for other positions within Xerox, Lightfoot said.

The bulk of the workers being laid off in Henderson – 125 of them – are pharmacy technicians.

Xerox decided last year to overhaul its government healthcare services business to focus on the more profitable segments that provide more than two-thirds of that operation’s revenue. That led the company to announce in October that it wouldn’t complete implementation of the Medicaid claims processing projects it has been working on for the states of California and Montana, resulting in a $389 million pre-tax charge.

Xerox provides a range of services to state Medicaid programs and federally funded healthcare programs in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Among them are processing Medicaid claims, pharmacy benefits management and processing eligibility applications.

At the end of January Xerox said it was eliminating 178 jobs at its call center in Cary, where at the time it employed more than 1,600 workers. Those employees had been doing work for a single client.

Xerox, which has reported 15 consecutive quarter of declining sales, also announced in January that it is spinning off the services business it acquired when it bought Affiliated Computer Services for nearly $6 billion in 2010.

Activist investor Carl Icahn had been pressuring the company to make such a move.

This story was originally published April 4, 2016 at 12:43 PM with the headline "Xerox is cutting 139 jobs in Henderson."