Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was being overcharged by the back-office services unit of Infosys Ltd ADR (NYSE:INFY), the Indian outsourcing major. This led to the exit of top executives, says a report from Reuters citing two senior people at Infosys on Thursday.
Top executives fired
Abraham Mathews, who was serving Infosys’ BPO unit as the chief financial officer was fired on Tuesday as informed by the company. This took place because of Mathews’ failure in complying with the company’s code of conduct. Another major exit was that of the CEO of Infosys BPO, Gautam Thakkar resigned on “moral grounds” from the company with November 30th being his last working day. The company did not disclose the charges against him, and said that he chose to resign on ‘moral grounds’. Few more senior executives will be sacked by the company because of the irregularities noticed during the internal audit that took place.
The wrongdoings that were noticed during the audit did not have any severe financial impact on the company, despite that Infosys stood firmly with its “zero-tolerance policy for any improper conduct,” and therefore took a tough stance against those found guilty.
It was found in the audit that Infosys had been producing inflated invoices and was over-billing Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) allegedly for many months and therefore Infosys has decided to fire 6 more of its employees at the unit, as informed by the Economic Times newspaper on Thursday.
Tough time for Infosys
“Mathews was sacked as he did not report the issue of over-billing of the back-end services being provided to Apple. He also failed to act swiftly on the charge,” an industry insider said on conditions of anonymity, report Reuters.
The company does not want to comment further on the confidential investigations as informed by Sarah Gideon, the Infosys spokeswoman. Through a mail she informed Reuters that the financial irregularities that came to light after the audit were not material in nature, and the required disclosure was already made by the company. Disciplinary action against the guilty employees was already taken by the company. There has been no comment from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) yet.
The issue has caused serious damages to Infosys’ reputation and therefore, the company is tackling it with all its seriousness so that it could check the damage and also give a warning to other employees. Retaining its staff and market share are two major challenges faced by Infosys in recent years.
