A federal agency is hanging up on its Lawrence-based national call center.

Vangent Inc., which has operated a call center on behalf of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since March 2005, this week said that it would not renew the contract.

The $5.8 million contract expires Sept. 20, but the commission already has agreed to a three-month extension that would make the center’s last day Dec. 21. Another extension could push the closing back another six months.

The center has 62 employees in the East Hills Business Park, where 1,350 employees work for Vangent, the company previously known as Pearson Government Solutions, the city’s largest private-sector employer.

All 62 employees can remain until the center closes, said Eileen Rivera, a Vangent spokeswoman.

“If it all goes the way that we think it will, we feel like we will more than likely be able to absorb them into the other programs we operate,” she said.

The center opened in 2005 as a pilot program backed by Cari Dominguez, then chairwoman of the EEOC. Dominguez had visited the center on its first official day, saying that it would take the commission’s services – enforcing federal laws that prohibit employment discrimination – to a “much higher level” than ever before.

But the center’s operations faced ongoing criticism, including complaints from EEOC employees who said that shedding their customer-service responsibilities had not resulted in significant time savings for them to tackle other responsibilities. An Inspector General’s report backed up the complaints.

“It was a pilot, and with any pilot project there are going to be kinks and bumps in the road as you go along,” EEOC spokesman David Grinberg said Tuesday. “However, throughout the process, : the EEOC worked very diligently – both with our own staff and the staff of the contact center – to improve. :

“We responded to concerns that were addressed by the union and the inspector general. In our opinion, those efforts have in large part been successfully completed. However, there was still strong opposition, and we had to examine other alternatives to the current operation.”

Money became a key component in the search for alternatives. Appropriations bills in Congress contained specific language requiring that the center be closed.

Rivera said that the contact center actually had received some of the highest marks ever bestowed by any of the company’s government clients.

“Politics got in the way of a successful operation,” she said. “It’s not about performance. It’s about politics.”

This week, the EEOC announced that it would hire a contractor to analyze the system and help devise a plan for transitioning back into having calls answered by federal employees.

The center at Vangent receives more than 70,000 calls and 3,000 e-mails each month, and provides translation services in 150 languages. The average wait time on each call is 30 seconds.

Vangent’s operations in East Hills continue to handle a variety of call- and data-center operations on behalf of other government agencies and services, such as for Medicare and student financial aid.