Investigations on real staff strength of Satyam

Hyderabad: Is the 53,000 employees’ number as claimed by Satyam Computer Services correct or does it have only 40,000 , as presented by the legal Counsel to CID in a City Court?

The six-member, Government-appointed Board, which deliberated two days on ‘salvaging’ the scam-hit company, said prima facie there appears to be no basis to doubt the number of associates. The independent investigation process is expected to reaffirm this fact in the coming weeks.

The Serious Fraud Investigating Office, which is probing the Satyam financial fraud, has reportedly sent an email to some employees at random to verify their email IDs. The objective was to seek an answer to the existence or otherwise of fictitious employees.

A brief questionnaire, seeking basic factual information has been mailed. In case of an auto-generated response, it could be construed as fictitious, a Satyam employee told Business Line.

Maintaining that the headcount was 53,000, T. Hari, Satyam’s Head of Marketing and Communication, said the company ran a headcount scan twice on Thursday (following claims of CID that the staff number might be inflated by up to 25 per cent).

He said there were two ways of ascertaining this – by checking the e-mails and active IDs, and by verifying the swipe cards across geographies.

“We have multiple ways of validating the number of associates. We do background checks for experience claims of all the senior guys joining the company.

“We check all the claims of academic and experience at this level,” he said.

“We have completed the process in September 2008. You can’t appraise a person who is not there.” The Satyam employees also got an e-mail from the Global Head (HR), S.V. Krishnan, on Friday, in which a further explanation was given. It stated that the information about headcount was maintained on SAP database.

While for the entry-level associates a bank guarantee exists (campus recruits), there was background verification in the case of lateral hires and off campus recruits.

Also the headcount in subsidiaries like the BPO and registered companies in China, Brazil, Malaysia and Egypt were included.