PF data helping IT companies identify ‘double job holders’

Recently, Wipro made it to headlines when it sacked 300 of its IT employees in India for moonlighting. It simply means that those Wipro employees who were working for another company secretly by exploiting the ‘work from home’ option were fired. Infosys and Tech Mahindra, too, have been in the news for mooting the option against their employees who are into moonlighting.

How are the companies getting to know the details of the employees who are into moonlighting? As per tech person and entrepreneur Rajiv Mehta, they are benefiting from Provident Fund data.

“The Government has long mandated that PF contribution has to be deposited regularly and its violation was a serious offence. All Aadhar and PAN numbers are taken by banks to open a salary account. The same data are used to deposit PF. The same are required by companies to do background checks. 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,” he writes.

“All databases of the Government are moving towards unified integration at a very fast pace,” he further says.