Wipro won't take fraud accused to court

BANGALORE, INDIA: As of now, India's IT major Wipro is not filing a formal complaint against its employee who is accused of siphoning off around Rs 18 crore ($4 million) from the company's bank account. Because, the company said, it has got back half the stolen money through dialogue, according to a report appeared in Business Standard.

Wipro said it was satisfied with the progress it has made by resorting to dialogue with the employee as suggested by an internal investigation team, said Business Standard.

In January last year, one month after the revelation about Satyam scam by the then company chief Ramalinga Raju, Wipro had said that there was no pressure on business because of the biggest scam the corporate India had ever seen.

But now, though Wipro has already initiated a probe into the fraud, things seem to be different here compared to Satyam, when it comes to handling the case. Of course, the scale of the fraud is nowhere near Satyam, and it seems to have no direct linkage with the company management.

The company wouldn't file a formal complaint, wouldn't disclose the name or the whereabouts of the accused employee who has been dismissed since the fraud came to light. Also, the company has not shared with the media the exact figure of the amount which had been stolen.

The only information available on that front was a cryptic statement from a Wipro source, which said, “The accused employee was working in the finance department and could have defrauded the company of up to $4 million.”

There was also questions about the security of internal account systems at Wipro. But some experts feel a secure IT system alone could do nothing much. “IT systems will help provide information, which needs to be understood and brings in transparency in the organizations,” says Avinash Kadam, director of MIEL e-Security, a provider of information security consultancy services.

He adds, “If you are good, IT will help bring better governance and if you are bad or greedy person, even the strongest of IT systems will fail to provide good governance.”

As in the case of any fraud, here also there was an apparent effort to cover up. Though Wipro found out the fraud in December, 2009, the world came to know about it when some reporters broke the news in February. If Wipro had voluntarily publicized the news, it would have turned a great lesson in corporate governance.