@ctg I can confirm what you are saying - once they flag it as a GR there is no way that an US resource can get it. In short, as they are budgeting things, they calculate a lower rate, and they know that it's going to be India in 90% of cases - so, really, they have baked in the budget that it'll be a 50K/yr position, fully loaded and will all expenses paid, so there is no way a US based resource would fit into that budget.
So, from the get go, all of us are excluded, and they know someone will be brought from offshore. This is rampant in GBS but in other parts of the company as well. I've worked on ERP projects all my life, and this is kind of how we make money. You can bitch about it all day, but it was Infy and Wipro who came up with this concept and undercut is in the early 2000s, we just could not compete with them as they were 70% less expensive - by now, we've figured it out too so we are playing too. Check out Accenture on that doleta site, 1000 positions in 30 days, it's nuts, they are in it completely too.
Again, we can bitch and whine about it all we want (trust me, I want to scream, that's how angry I am) but the only way to stop this is to have it fixed on the legislative side, but since every single politician is bought and they are all in bed with IT companies, I am not even sure that anything like this would be possible.
It's so utterly f---ed up to the core...