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Anything Grey is Black', warns a placard in the reception area of Wipro's Sarjapur empire in Bangalore.

Inside, in the corporate block, the conscience-keeper of the company, chief risk officer and ombudsman Ishwar Hemarajani tracks all things disturbing. He singles out a file with a small newspaper clip: The Bangalore Police has busted a job racket and arrested the owner of a job consultancy firm, following a complaint from an engineering student who was promised an MNC job but was repeatedly dodged. “I have forwarded this to the resourcing team,” he tells.

The resourcing team has discovered an equally disturbing drift. During an audit earlier this year, a pattern in the resumes of some employees in the mainframes skills area, inducted in the last six to eight months, was unmasked. The projects executed were similar in nature and content, so were the employers. Further due diligence revealed that many CVs even had the same spelling errors. “It was clear somebody was orchestrating this,” says Wipro's VP (strategic resourcing), Achuthan Nair.

There are many one-room shops that represent themselves as IT staffing and development companies. For a price, they can craft resumes with a fraudulent background, coach the candidates to take the interview, and, once cleared, wave the green signal to the verifier who calls for a background check.

The modus operandi known, Wipro blacklisted six such agencies and filed police complaints. It terminated many employees: less than a hundred, but still a substantial number, constituting about 1.5% of its annual attrition rate. 

Ishwar B Hemarajani, chief risk officer, Wipro Says the completeness of background checks has to be clearly defined. "There are no proven databases currently available; no police record system; no certification registry; no database of colleges"

Troubled at the recruitment gate by fraudsters wanting to make a quick buck, the company is more careful now. Sudip Banerjee is president of Enterprise Solutions, a business unit with 13,000 people. He still has to scan the credentials of candidates selected in his division. “Look at the thickness of documentation,” he says, showing the papers. Fitment, checklist, application forms, selection data forms, education certificates, bank documents-and you have as comprehensive a file as possible.

Wipro is also talking to competition, the Infosys and the Satyams, sharing information and noting their best practices. Where there was one interviewer earlier, now there are two, and a more senior interviewer. But, as many companies have realized, even stringent recruitment measures are not infallible before equally smart and persistently innovating con stars. 

“It's a serious issue,” Sudip says. Serious for two reasons: one, it reflects very badly on the state of the industry; two, lot of unscrupulous people seem to think that there is very easy entry into the industry and they can continue with it. “From both the points of view, which is long-term damage and the image-beating the industry may take if the issue blows up, are very grim,” he explains.

The grimness is because misrepresenting experience and education facts in resumes are just one of the many faces of this vice. There are false allowance claims to evade taxation, misuse of company assets, forging of travel statements, influencing suppliers to garner favor, hiding criminal history or even citizenship amongst a host of other ethics contraventions that strike hard at the very roots of business code of conduct, which some organizations broadcast.

Last year, Intel had to take out many employees, reportedly over 200, due to integrity issues over false driver, medical and HRA claims, unearthed after an extensive audit. Satyam separated 500. IBM says about 10% of the resumes it receives are chucked out every month due to discrepancies.

The KPMG Fraud Survey 2006 found that a large proportion of respondents (46%) were not able to uncover misleading information in CVs. Incorrect information included inflated salaries (23%), inflated accomplishments (20%), inaccurate dates to cover up job hopping or gaps in employment (17%) and inflated titles (12%).

Based on its experience of doing employment screening, it discovered that around 5% of the CVs where it does background checks have discrepancies.

Most of these problems may not be exclusive to the IT industry, but are perhaps more visible because of the supply side scenario. The good thing is, many companies have now started talking openly about the skeletons in their cupboard rather then being overtly worried about “bad publicity” or just slamming it as “confidential to the company”.

But one does wonder, all the same, why software professionals, amongst the best paid people in India, need to falsify documents to claim minor tax exemptions. Good money is also why many are drawn to this industry in the first place, and some of the problems begin exactly here.

Is It Social Laxity?
While there are a lot of jobs up for grabs in the IT/ITeS space, there is also a big disparity between the compensation levels of this sector versus the rest of the economy. So, if people can join the IT bandwagon somehow, there is a big pay off. “There are people who perhaps don't have the credentials, but see their friends take their salary levels up by joining the IT industry. If you spend 10 years in IT versus 10 years in manufacturing, there will be a big gap. If you are talking of a one to five years range, it will probably be a gap of 30 and 50%. A person with a job in an industrial undertaking with three years experience would get 50% more if he got into IT,” explains the director of Finance with IBM India, Amit Sharma.

Bhaskar Das VP, HR, Cognizant Says organizations have to invest in communication and transparency. "Employees need to know that if they do something wrong, chances are very high that they will get caught and two, if they get caught, no matter how good they are at the job, they will be punished"		Amit Sharma director, finance, IBM India Says there is zero tolerance for any inappropriate disclosures. "It is embedded in one of our three values-we call it trust and personal responsibility in all relationships. This is the bedrock of our thoughts and if people believe in it, they belong in here."

The economics of this really drives some amount of integrity violations. While the IT industry is recruiting in droves, there is still a bottom 40% of the engineering population who are either not getting jobs or are not getting jobs in the IT sector or are not getting jobs in companies they want to work with. “Many such people who did their engineering do post graduation and end up as lecturers in some college. But they still want to join an IT company for more money. They manage to get into a small IT company in another two years, but by this time they get desperate,” says Achuthan Nair of Wipro. In wanting to join an Accenture, TCS or Infosys, many of them go wrong. The resume fakers, he contends, are candidates with between two and five years of experience. Anyone with more than five years experience will have contacts in the industry and may not misrepresent facts in his CV. But as companies realize, there are other ethical boundaries one might jump.

Indian tax laws provide tax exemptions on certain categories of expenditure like leave travel undertaken twice in a block of four years. The law also allows claims of up to Rs 15,000 a year against variable pay of an individual for expenses incurred in treatment of medical conditions. It is common practice among employees of some organizations to submit fake travel documents or medical bills so as to avoid paying taxes to the government.  “If I cheat MindTree, I am at fault. If I cheat Chidambaram, what's your problem?” COO Subroto Bagchi points to the psychology of a person defrauding the government. Call it a lax view of integrity. Of poor training. Of upbringing. Because many lateral recruits come from companies that have lower standards of corporate governance. Whatever the reason, some companies have started putting their foot down-like we saw with Intel last year when several senior people from the prestigious Whitefield Project were shown the door. “Whether the government is ever going to actually verify a claim or not, we are required by the law to satisfy ourselves about the genuineness of a claim; if we know that a claim is false and an employee is submitting it, irrespective of the amount of money involved, the person involved or the consequences to our business, we would ask the person to leave,” the MindTree Integrity Policy spells out.

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