Sulekha.com: Employee swindles 7 Lakh
By Bala Shah

One of the most popular and respected classifieds and blog website – Sulekha.com was swindled by an employee in Chennai recently. The employee who was in sales was managing one of the most popular channels of the website and had been with the company for more than 2 years.

It has been alleged that more than seven lakh rupees is being unaccounted for though the speculation among the other employees is that it might be more than ten lakh rupees.

This isn’t the first instance where an employee had swindled the company though. A sales executive who was from the same channel had also cheated the company of about 1.5  lakh rupees. The fraud was exposed when the clients had come down to the company demanding for their money back.

Both the employees have been immediately dismissed but the entire amount hasn’t been recovered from them.

What motivates these people to cheat? They take good salaries home and their incentives are thrice the salary amount if they are good in sales. And the company is well known for paying well to its sales people.

One of the foremost reasons for this kind of incidents in any company would be lax process, reporting and documenting issues. Sales are the bloodline of the company hence those who bring in the money are very important to the management but they should not be exempt from following the proper process of accounting and reporting.

It is the management’s duty to encourage a good performer but not to the extent of giving him a free reign without any kind of accounting or reporting so long as they bring in the money. Presented with this kind of opportunity anybody would be tempted to cheat the company.

It is high time that the investors and the top management officials sit up and notice the lack of proper process in this particular channel.

(Sulekha.com has issued the following statement to techgoss.com

“
We would like share with you the developments in the concerned case and would also like to give you an insight into the systems and practices followed at Sulekha.com.
 
Current Status: A significant majority of the funds have been recovered from the ex-employee and we feel confident the rest of the funds would also be recovered.

Sales process / system at Sulekha.com: Sulekha.com has a fairly vast sales infrastructure covering 7 cities in India and US for multiple services. Though we have a fairly robust sales process that detects and preempts misappropriation of funds and are confident any misappropriation is a rare occurrence, people can always find ways to subvert it for a period of time and go undetected. This is a problem faced by many companies who have distributed sales force and, like with computer security, hacks of the same type are preempted by instituting additional checks and audits. At Sulekha, we do the same.

At Sulekha, we believe integrity is very important and that we are fiduciaries of company property and funds. When we find this principle compromised, we feel compelled to take decisive action in keeping with our legal and ethical responsibilities to our stakeholders.

No system is fail-proof but we are committed to ensuring our systems get increasingly effective.

Internal HR Policy: Infractions and violations of company policies vary in terms of magnitude of harm caused and evidence of pre-meditated intent to misappropriate. Each instance is treated on a case-by-case basis. If we feel the violation is not serious, a clear warning is given to the employee. If we conclude the violation is serious and the employee willfully conspired to misappropriate and cover it up, we move to terminate the employee for cause. It is the objective of Sulekha.com's HR policy to be fair and firm.“)