Not only are Indian startups being rocked by founders and workers embezzling cash from their own businesses, but scandals are now being uncovered at the biggest and most prestigious IT organizations.
After discovering a Rs. 100 billion jobs-For-Bribes Scam, four Employees at TCS were sacked. Several senior TCS employees accepted kickbacks from recruiting companies in exchange for hiring their applicants. According to a TCS official, In response to a Rs. 100 billion “Jobs-for-Bribes” scam, four employees at TCS were fired, and TCS has employed 3 lakh workers in the previous three years.
What was the Rs. 100 Billion Jobs-For-Bribes Scam about?
A whistleblower informed TCS’s CEO and COO that E.S. Chakravarthy, the worldwide head of the company’s resource management group (RMG), had been taking commissions from staffing companies for years. This information led to the discovery of the fraud. TCS swiftly assembled a team of three officials, including the company’s chief information security officer, Ajit Menon, to look into the accusations after receiving the report.
Following many weeks of inquiry, TCS suspended Chakravarthy, fired four RMG officials, and blacklisted three employment agencies. The COO has banned ES Chakravarthy from reporting to the office. Chakravarthy joined TCS in 1997 and was a Vice President at the time.
An executive remarked, “The senior leadership as a whole is astonished. ” This raises the question of whether there were sufficient guardrails and how such a thing could occur. The unsettling fact is that we are aware of how widespread and how long this fraud has been going on.”
“In only the previous three years, we have employed approximately 300,000 individuals, including contractors. You can only imagine the scope of this fraud if even 10% of all hiring was done through chosen staffing agencies and those businesses received commissions on each hire,” added the aforementioned CEO. They said, “I think it will be at least 100 crore.”
Many of TCS’s personnel are hired via recruiting companies. The corporation receives lists of applicants from these firms, which then administer exams or conduct interviews before hiring the people as necessary. Around 3,000 individuals work for TCS’ RMG business, where the fraud occurred, and 1,400 engineers are assigned to projects every day. It appears that certain top personnel discovered a flaw in this procedure and were able to take advantage of it for lengthy periods of time to profit themselves.
Even though TCS is one of India’s most reputable firms and is well known for its corporate governance, it appears that even it was the victim of the schemes of certain dishonest insiders. Which just serves to demonstrate how difficult it may be to create foolproof systems when the players themselves want to breach the rules, regardless of how effective the guardrails may be.
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