3 Infosys Employees Arrested Over Charges Of Taking Bribes From Tax-Payers For Speedy Processing Of Refund

Three Infosys employees-Renukakunta Kalyan Kumar, Deveeshwar Reddy, and Prakash - attached to the Income Tax department's Centralised Processing Centre in Bengaluru, were arrested by the Electronics City police for allegedly taking bribes from tax-payers for speedy processing of their refund, The Hindu reported.

Bengaluru-headquartered Infosys, which is the technology partner for the Income Tax Department’s Central Processing Centre (CPC) at Electronics City campus, confirmed the development. The company said that three of its employees had been terminated after a “thorough internal investigation”. It said the company took any breach of its policies and code of conduct seriously, and added, “We are fully cooperating with the authorities”.

According to police, the key accused among the three was attached to the CPC's data division and had demanded and collected money through his friends from some major taxpayers with whom he had contact over phone for processing their I-T refund claims at the earliest.

According to police and IT department sources, the accused established contact with select assessees whose PAN had been flagged owing to major discrepancies, which meant the refund would take time till the case was cleared at the CPC. Knowing that refunds would be delayed for such flagged PANs, the accused contacted the assessees directly and offered to process the returns for a commission of 4%.

Recently, one of the taxpayers refused to pay the money and shared the audio recording of his conversation with the accused with Income Tax officials who held an internal enquiry and then approached the police.

The Electronics City police have registered a case of cheating and criminal breach of trust against them.

The police suspected the trio might have made about Rs 15 lakh so far as commission from taxpayers.