One of the top IT companies in India, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has been rocked by a bribery scandal involving senior employees. According to a Mint article, some employees in the company’s resource management group (RMG) have accepted payments from staffing companies over a protracted period of time to gain jobs for their candidates.
An internal committee made up of three people—including chief information security officer Ajit Menon—was established to look into the accusations after Mint gained access to a whistleblower report. Following the probe, TCS fired four employees from the RMG business, placed its head of recruiting on leave, and barred three staffing companies from operating.
The global head of RMG and one of the defendants, ES Chakravarthy, has been prohibited from attending the office. Another employee from the RMG division, Arun GK, was also fired. Those connected to the fraud are thought to have earned commissions of at least Rs 100 crore ($14 million) during the previous three years.
An unnamed TCS official expressed disbelief over the circumstances, pointing out that this is the first controversy to be revealed involving the company. The timing is particularly problematic because it comes just a few days after K Krithivasan started serving as TCS’s CEO. Additionally, TCS recently won its fourth significant contract in the UK this year, with Nest’s pension plan.
TCS’s executive hiring procedure mostly relies on employee referral programmes and alliances with staffing companies. These companies give TCS candidate lists, and TCS analyses the candidates via tests or interviews before making recruiting decisions based on the company’s requirements.
Adding Employees, Adding Bribes
Averaging one placement per minute, the RMG division, which employs about 3,000 people, arranges the daily placement of about 1,400 engineers on various projects. In recent years, TCS has increased its workforce by an average of 50,000 people annually, including contractors. Although the full extent of the abnormalities is still unknown, given the size of TCS’s recruitment activities, the impact might be substantial.
TCS replied to the accusations by claiming that the business has effective systems in place for looking into and dealing with such problems.
Many people were shocked to learn about this recruitment scam at TCS, a $27.93 billion corporation with approximately 614,795 workers. It makes one wonder if there were enough precautions in place and how such a thing could have happened.
