Ex-employees claim India's largest IT firm falsified records to bypass US visa rules

In context: When Donald Trump first took office in 2017, he came out swinging against the H-1B visa program for skilled foreign workers. He claimed it allowed companies to bring in "cheap labor" that undercut American employees. This led to heightened scrutiny of the way certain companies were using employment visas. One of them was Tata Consultancy Services, one of India's leading IT services companies.

Now, multiple former employees have come forward alleging that during those Trump years, TCS executives had them falsifying internal organizational charts to make the company appear more top-heavy with managers.

The aim was to prepare for any crackdown on how TCS used specialty visas designed for executives and managers known as L-1As. Former company IT manager Anil Kini told Bloomberg that as Trump took office, executives at the company were trying to make their organizational charts match their visa applications, in anticipation of any federal inspectors showing up.

Kini is one of three whistleblowers who filed federal False Claims Act lawsuits accusing TCS of systematically misusing the easy-to-get L-1A visas to bring in cheaper labor. He claims his bosses ordered him to inflate organizational charts with fake managerial roles that didn't really exist. When he resisted and filed an internal complaint about the deception in 2017, he says TCS fired him the following year in retaliation. Kini is now appealing after his lawsuit was initially dismissed.

Vinod Govindharajan, another former employee who raised concerns with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), says TCS obtained his L-1A in 2013 by falsely portraying him as a manager.

"I was doing a sales role, nothing to do with management," Govindharajan told Bloomberg.

So, just how prevalent was TCS' use of the L-1A visas? Data obtained by Bloomberg shows the company has blown every other employer out of the water when it comes to these manager visas in recent years. It obtained 6,682 L-1A approvals from 2020-2023, which is more than five times as many as the next highest recipients, Infosys and Cognizant.

The data also shows that TCS' L-1A visa totals far exceed the number of actual managers TCS claimed to employ in mandatory EEOC reports over that same period.

Moreover, the EEOC told Govindharajan in a 2019 letter that it found "credible documentary evidence" that TCS "frequently falsifies documents" for L-1A visas and pays Indian visa workers less. However, the agency lacks authority over immigration laws.

When presented with the whistleblower claims and Bloomberg's data, a TCS spokesperson denied any wrongdoing, saying "TCS rigorously adheres to all US laws." The company claims prior allegations were already investigated and dismissed from court.