When the English writer George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four, way back in 1949, he couldn’t have seen the coming of an industry called business process outsourcing. His concerns in the novel were deep, dark and geopolitical in nature. Fears of an Orwellian world might have come to an end with the death of communism, but the Indian BPO industry is turning into a mini Orwellian eco-system, with Big Brother lurking everywhere you turn.

At an audit and advisory firm such as KPMG, you would expect to find bean counters and suits. But sleuths? The company’s forensic services practice, which offers pre-employment screening, background check and fraud investigation services to a large number of BPOs, has witnessed its revenues skyrocketing in the last two years. Its 60-people team includes five senior former CBI and IB officers. A few months back, KPMG’s crack team solved a case where an employee of an Indian BPO was helping a bunch of UK-based fraudsters manipulate bank accounts to the tune of several million dollars. Once the data analytics team spotted unusual credit repair patterns, the investigators put suspected employees on surveillance, tracked their system login history and conducted a series of interviews before zeroing in on the culprit.

According to Deepak Sanwalka, executive director, (forensic advisory services), KPMG, organised crime groups in US and UK target BPO employees to carry out frauds. “Our investigative resources are as good, and sometimes better than those of law enforcement agencies. We are usually a step ahead of the police investigations”, he says. Such forensic teams are a mix of former sleuths and cops who have a good understanding of crime, and auditors and bankers who have the ability to go through the nitty-gritty of numbers. Similarly Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC)
unearthed a case recently where a departmental head at a BPO was leaking client data to competitors. “We covertly took charge of the computers that were suspect, went to the service providers to provide information about the users, and later ran forensic software on them”, explains Sumit Makhija, associate director, dispute analysis and investigations wing, PwC.
After a series of back-to-back interviews conducted by its team of exintelligence officers and bankers, with more than five suspects, the offender, who was passing on proprietary information and corporate plans, was nabbed. Client confidentiality and secrecy of the data related to their customers being paramount, the first brush with Big Brother occurs in the form of pre-employment screening and background and criminal check, as soon as a candidate applies to work at a call centre.
Although it sounds like a logistical nightmare, nearly every candidate who applies for a job with some of the larger BPOs in India has his or her antecedents checked by the companies. “Data security, more than anything else, gives Indian BPOs sleepless nights”, says Sanwalka, KPMG, which has around 30 BPO clients, carries out background checks on nearly 4,000 people every month. That includes verifying the educational qualifications mentioned by the candidates by checking with the concerned universities, residential address verification, and working along with the police to check if the candidate has a criminal record.

Interestingly, this has spawned a new revenue stream for universities, who have begun charging a fee from these agencies for verifying the academic records of their former students. Each verification could cost the BPO firms anything between 3,000 and 10,000. The checks also require 14 days to a month to execute, “There is an increasing tendency these days to misrepresent personal and career information. Every one in six applications that we check has some kind of false information. Checks ensure that reputation risks are mitigated”, says Ashish Dehade, MD, First Advantage Corporation India, a global risk mitigation and employment screening firm. “There is a huge fear of data leakage in the West, and India is a very important outsourcing destination. So we need to ensure that clients feel secure doing business with us”, adds Ashu Calapa, head HR, Firstsource, which completely outsources background check to third party agencies such as First Advantage and Authbridge.

Questions
1. What environmental factors have contributed to the turning of Indian BPO industry into an Orwellian eco-system?
2. What legal system do you suggest to check fraudulent practices in BPO industry? Do you think that the present judiciary system, as it is now in place, is adequate to check such practices?