How Wipro caught 300 moonlighters that the company sacked, a viral tweet explains – Times of India

IT giant Wipro recently sacked 300 employees for ‘moonlighting’ as the IT services company toughens its stand against staffers taking a second job after work hours. Wipro chairman Rishad Premji, who has been a vocal critic of moonlighting, said that the company has no place for any employee who chooses to work directly with rivals while being on Wipro payrolls. “The reality is that there are people today working for Wipro and working directly for one of our competitors and we have actually discovered 300 people in the last few months who are doing exactly that,” Premji said.
While there have been reports that the company found out about these employees moonlighting by accessing the Universal Account Number (UAN) from the employers’ portal of the Employees’ Provident Fund, there has never been an official confirmation. Now a viral tweet claims to reveal how Wipro found out about these employees. The tweet is from Rajiv Mehta who usually shares stock market tips on Twitter.
Mehta has shared a long thread on Twitter that explains how Wipro may have found “culprits”. “300 #Wipro employees sacked as they took advantage of work from home and worked parallely with another company. How #Digital #India has precisely found the culprits is amazing. Kindly read the below article. Fantastic system in place in India,” goes the first tweet.
The following tweet describes what moonlighting is. Then Mehta comes to the modus operandi of the employees caught moonlighting. “IT professionals in their Work From Home avatar joined other companies who were also in Work From Home mode. Same competency, double delivery. Two different laptops, same WiFi , catering to two different clients – all from the comfort of own home, in own hometown.”
“Govt mandated that PF contribution has to be deposited regularly and it’s violation was a serious offence. Lo behold, as all Aadhar, PAN numbers are taken by banks to open salary account, same are used to deposit PF, same are required by companies to do background check,” he says in the next tweet.
Mehta then describes how all these systems are integrated to check fraud. “Systems are so beautifully integrated at the back end that it was next to impossible for these moonlighters to create two identities both financially and demographically. So the PF runs a daily De-Duplication algorithm to check if someone has paid double accidentally.”
“They found out that there are accounts of individuals, where contributors are multiple. This was reported to companies, and the entire Bhanumati ka kunaba came down crashing. This is the power of Digital India working at grass roots level to weed out corruption,” writes Mehta, terming it the power of Digital India.
In the following tweets, Mehta talks about how well-knit all these IT systems are.