Is This How Wipro Caught 300 Moonlighters?

For the unversed, Moonlighting is serving more than one employer at a time, by the IT workers.

With the work-from-home option available to most of IT employees due to the pandemic, the option is being abused by some of them. The moonlighting incident in September that involved workers from Wipro caused a major storm in the IT industry. Wipro found that 300 of its employees were concurrently employed by other IT firms and it fired all of them labeling them as ‘cheaters’.

There has been an endless debate on why Wipro had to fire them for the ‘allegedly’ unethical practice of the moonlighters. A stock market investor made a series of tweets to explain how the company caught the moonlighters off-guard.

Twitter user Rajiv Mehta’s tweets have now gone viral after he explained how the company found the moonlighters. Rajiv Mehta says that the moonlighters were found by the most unexpected – ‘Provident Fund Contribution’.

Rajiv Mehta wrote, ‘IT professionals in their Work From Home avtaar joined other companies who were also in Work From Home mode. Same competency, double delivery. Two different laptops, same WiFi, catering to two different clients – all from the comfort of own home, in own hometown. Both networks/ jobs performing exceedingly well – just to avoid suspicion.‘

It was impossible to catch them. *Then who caught them?

The most innocent looking, unassuming, always in the background – Provident Fund Contribution.’

Govt mandated that PF contribution has to be deposited regularly and its violation was a serious offense. Lo behold, as all aadhar, and PAN numbers are taken by banks to open salary accounts, same are used to deposit PF, same are required by companies to do background checks. Systems are so beautifully integrated at the back end that it was next to impossible for these moonlighters to create two identities both financially and demographically.

So 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, and the entire Bhanumati ka kunaba came down crashing. This is the power of Digital India working at the grassroots level to weed out corruption. GOI saw this potential years ago and has been incessantly prodding Govt organizations to go digital.

Today our UPI and Aadhar technology stack is the most sought-after in the world. In the background, India is integrating all of its islands of excellence. All databases of Govt are moving towards unified integration at a very fast pace. An open architecture where every database talks to others seamlessly without human intervention. We are the only country in the world where the delivery of citizen-centric services through technology has matured to a level where it’s become a way of life. #DigitalIndia’