Bribes-For-Jobs Scam Unearthed At TCS, Four Employees Sacked On Graft Charges: Report

TCS employees involved in the scam may have earned at least Rs 100 crore through commissions, the report said

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s biggest IT services company, has been rocked by a bribes-for-jobs scandal. According to a report published by Mint, a few senior executives in TCS were accepting bribes for years from staffing agencies for giving jobs to their candidates. This has led to sacking of four officials from its resource management group (RMG) and banning three staffing companies. 

An executive quoted in the report said that in the past three years, TCS hired 300,000 people, including contractors. They added that the employees involved in the scam may have earned at least Rs 100 crore through commissions. "The entire senior leadership is shocked," the official told Mint. A whistleblower at the company wrote to the company's CEO and COO stating that the global head of RMG, ES Chakravarthy, had been accepting commissions from these staffing agencies, as reported by Mint.

Following that development, TCS formed a panel of three members, including chief information security officer Ajit Menon to probe the allegations. After the conclusion of the probe, TCS sent its head of recruitment on leave and sacked four officials from RMG. Chakravarthy has been debarred from coming to the office. Another official in the RBM division, Arun GK, has been asked to go.

The most preferred routes for hiring executives, as well as contractors for IT firms such as TCS, are employee referral programmes and staffing firms. These firms provide lists of candidates to the company, which then conducts tests or interviews and later hires them as per the need.

The RMG division of TCS has around 3,000 people and places around 1,400 engineers on projects daily. The average comes out to be one placement every minute. This is also the first such scandal that has been reported in TCS. It comes just days after K Krithivasan took over as the company's chief executive officer (CEO).

 TCS came into the news last week as the company is experiencing higher attrition, especially among its women employees as the company no longer allows employees to work remotely. TCS' the new policy, however, hasn’t found many takers among the women employees. The rate of resigning have been steadily rising lately. According to TCS, the decision by the company to end work from home (WFH) is one of the major factors contributing to the rapid resignation of female employees.