Bribes-for-jobs scam uncovered at TCS, miscreants may have made Rs 100 cr

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of the biggest IT firms in India, has been rocked by a bribes-for-jobs scandal. According to a report by Mint, a few senior personnel at the company were accepting bribes from staffing firms for giving jobs to their candidates, for years.

This has led to the company sacking four officials from its resource management group (RMG) and banning three staffing firms.

The report said that earlier, 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 firms.

The company then formed a committee 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 sacked.

An executive quoted in the report said that in the last three years, the company hired 300,000 people, including contractors. They added that the people involved in the scam may have earned at least Rs 100 crore through commissions.

"The entire senior leadership is shocked," the official told Mint.

The most preferred routes for hiring executives, as well as contractors for IT companies like 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).