Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran said on June 29 that the IT and consulting company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has sacked six employees after finding them guilty of accepting favours from certain staffing firms in the appointment of contractual workers.
“We have sacked six employees and also banned six staffing companies,” he said in response to questions from shareholders.
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, after which it investigated the allegations.”
“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 said.
Recently, a veteran of 30 years, Sivakumar Viswanathan has been appointed as new head of the Resource Management Group (RMG). After a whistleblower blew the lid on unethical practices at the hiring of contract workers the former global head of the recruitment arm E.S. Chakravarthy has been sent on leave.
Resource Management Group oversees the hiring of contract workers and internally deploys people to projects. The company has sacked 15 people from the RMG divisions in the US, Canada, and India’s Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
“TCS has started auditing all contract staffing vendors working with the company,” said an industry executive aware of the development.
“All their procurement and RMG teams across geographies have been asked to file reports of every hire over the last 2-3 years and mention which division and vendor have sourced them and at what price.”
RMG at TCS plays a vital role as the division deploys 1,400 engineers to a project every day, averaging a placement a minute.
The company’s headcount as of March 31, 2023, stood at 6,14,795. In the previous quarter, TCS in Q3FY23 posted a decline of 2,197 people in its employee base, and TCS headcount stood at 613,974 as on December 31, 2022.
