BENGALURU: The country’s largest IT services company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Thursday at its annual general meeting informed shareholders that it has banned six employees and six business associate firms and an investigation is going on with three more employees.
For the first time, the company mentioned on record the banning of six employees with regard to the alleged jobs-for-bribe scam at the company. Earlier, in a BSE filing, it had said no key managerial person of the company has been found to be involved.
TCS Chairman N Chandrasekaran said the company received two whistleblower complaints (one related to India, and another one related to US) towards February-end and March-end and both the complaints were investigated. “The complaints were about certain favouritism being done and favours being received in recruitment of BAs (business associates),” he said.
He explained that the company has two departments -- one is the HR and talent acquisition, which hires people, and the second one is the Resource Allocation Group (RAG), which is about deployment of the available resources into projects. “Whenever there is a talent shortage or a particular skill that is not available at that point in time in the location where we need them, the company has a set of, we call them business associate firms, the firms to get contract employees,” he added.
“At any point in time in the overall deployment of resources, about 2-3% are such BA associates or contractors. And this complaint was related to certain individuals in the company working with certain BA firms to be recruiting in their favour,” he informed.
Chandrasekaran also said that the investigation in India is done by a senior officer in the company and in the US market, they had an external firm to do that. He said they found six employees did not follow the ethical conduct. “While we cannot quantify what favours they got, they certainly behaved in a way that they were favouring certain firms,” he said.