Software and services major Tata Consultancy Services has banned six employees and firms over charges of bribe in employee hiring, as per Chairman N Chandrasekaran’s statement during 28th annual general meeting of shareholders of the company. The IT major informed that three more employees are being investigated. The company received two whistleblower complaints by end February and March first week and after carefully investigating the complaints, the company has taken action.

While talking about hiring and resource allocation to projects at TCS, Chairman Chandrasekaran said, “The company has two departments. One is the HR and talent acquisition, which hires people. The second is the Resource Allocation Group, which is about deployment of the available resources into projects. And 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.”

As per complaints, many senior executives took bribes from staffing firms to favor their candidates. So far, 15 executives have been either sacked or demoted by the company. TCS is currently auditing is entire recruitment process and its relationship with staffing firms.

Chandrasekaran discussed the matter in detail during the shareholder meeting. He added that six employees were found guilty of not following the ethical process during hiring candidates. Chandrasekaran added, “While we cannot quantify what favors they got but they certainly behaved in a way that they were favoring certain firms. There are a large number of BA firms that TCS works with. There is a rigorous process in the company to recruit or qualify a firm to be called a BA firm. There are about a little over 1,000 such firms globally because we need resources in 55 such countries.”

TCS and all Tata Group companies are professionally managed and the have zero tolerance to unethical behavior. The company clarified that no key managerial person at TCS was involved in the recruitment scam.

The resource management group (RMG division) has been involved with hiring of less than one percent of workforce at TCS. RMG will undergo major changes after this incident. The financial impact of these changes at TCS will be minimal on the performance of the company.