TCS Fires 16 Employees, Bars Six Vendors Involved In Hiring Scam

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. has fired 16 employees and barred six vendors from the company over a purported hiring scam that surfaced in June this year.

India’s IT bellwether, which has nearly 600,000 employees across 55 countries, has two departments that conduct the hiring process for the company.

• HR & Talent Acquisition, which hires people on the payroll.

• Resource Allocation Group, which deploys available resources.

Whenever there is a talent or skill shortage, TCS has a set of business associate firms—about a thousand across its global operations—to get contractual employees. At any point of time of deployment, about 2-3% are contractual workers.

The two whistleblower complaints related to certain individuals in the company, who were working with certain business associate firms to recruit contractual workers in their favour, Tata Sons Chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran said at the TCS AGM on June 29. “There is a rigorous process in the company to recruit a firm and empanel a firm, to call it a business associate,” he had said.

For a Tata Group company, the most important thing that is expected of every employee is ethical conduct and integrity in operation. That comes ahead of any financial performance, Chandrasekeran had said.

“Whenever there is a violation of any ethical conduct by any employee, it pains us and pains me very deeply,” he had said. “We take it extremely seriously, and we will always deal with this with very strong action.”