Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has issued an official statement to all its board members to inform and clarify about allegations of a hiring scandal at the country’s largest IT services firm, according to a report by the Economic Times.
While the investigation is underway and the final report is still awaited, initial reading shows that subcontractors are a very small proportion of the overall workforce of the company and the claims are ridiculously exaggerated, one of the TCS directors said, reported ET.
"This is not an issue related to hiring of employees of TCS, but with the contractors of TCS, there are claims that the amount involved is Rs 100 crore, it is not even remotely close to it," the board member added. TCS has informed all the directors about the situation.
TCS is also consulting with external auditors to probe the matter.
Last week, the company was alerted about a multi-crore recruitment scam, compromising the hiring process at the Tata Group company.
The issue was discovered after a whistleblower wrote to the company’s CEO and COO about the senior executives violating the corporate code of conduct to give preferential treatment to some staffing firms at the company’s Resource Management Group (RMG). The whistleblower alleged that the global head of RMG, ES Chakravarthy, had been accepting bribes from the staffing firms involved in hiring candidates.
After that, the country’s biggest private employer formed a three-member panel which included Chief Information Security Officer Ajit Menon, to investigate the allegations.
In a statement on Friday, TCS said that “this does not involve any fraud by or against the company and has no financial impact”. The company also said that no key managerial person in the company is involved.
“The issue relates to a breach of the company's code of conduct by certain employees and vendors providing contractors,” it added.
