Tata Consultancy Services said it has banned six employees and six business associates or subcontractors for accepting favours from certain staffing firms in the appointment of contractual workers.
It is also investigating the role of three more of its employees, Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran said.
Rs 100 crore scam
It had discovered within its ranks a multi-crore recruitment scam that compromised the hiring process at the firm.
People involved in the scam may have earned Rs 100 crore through commissions.
“While we cannot quantify what favours they got, they were certainly behaving in a way that they were favouring BA (business associate) firms,” Chandrasekaran said.
US complaint
He said the company received two separate whistleblower complaints — one pertaining to appointment of business associates or contractual workers in the US, and one in India, in late February and March.
The US complaint is being investigated by an external investigator.
Context
TCS has two departments responsible for hiring.
One is HR & Talent Acquisition, which hires people on the payroll.
The other is Resource Allocation Group, which deploys available resources.
Whenever there is a talent or skill shortage, TCS has a set of business associate firms to get contractual employees.
TCS works with over 1,000 third-party recruitment firms.
So what happened?
TCS found there was favouritism and favours were being received in recruitment of business associates.
Business associates in company parlance refers to subcontractors or staffing firms that provide contractual employees.
A whistleblower alleged that a senior executive at the company’s resource management group was accepting bribes from staffing firms for years.
Senior exec involved
Action has been initiated against five employees, including ES Chakravarthy, global head of TCS’s resource management group (RMG).
Chakravarthy had been accepting commissions from staffing firms for a number of years against recruiting their candidates in specific contracts, the whistleblower said.
Taking action
Chandrasekaran said, “The company will look at the whole BA (Business Associate) supplier management process and see what the weaknesses are and will completely tighten the process to ensure that we do not have such incidents.”
He also said that TCS is taking a relook at the supplier management process.
The company has named a new head to oversee the hiring of temporary workers, Sivakumar Viswanathan, a veteran of about 30 years.
