India’s outsourcing companies plan to introduce a national screening programme for employees to improve the security of clients’ systems, according to Personnel Today’s sister magazine Computer Weekly. The programme is being planned by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NassCom), and comes after the arrest of three former employees at an Indian outsourcer servicing Citibank accounts, for allegedly stealing $322,000 (£170,000) from US customer accounts by stealing customer phone numbers and ringing them off-site to obtain account access details. The NassCom screening programme would allow existing or potential staff in India’s burgeoning software development and outsourcing industries to register their details in a national database. Their details would then be checked and verified by an agency, and every time they applied for a job the potential employer could pay to check their backgrounds. As well as having to deliver greater staff security, some leading Indian companies have recently had to counter the threat of terrorism by regional separatist groups. Last month, Bangalore-based outsourcers Wipro and Infosys Technologies had their corporate headquarters evacuated as a result of bomb scares. The separatists see IT services companies as an ideal economic target for their campaigns.
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