The wife and I take this one step further. If it’s important, they can send us a letter in the U.S. mail. We blow off everything we receive in emails and all phone calls from unknown numbers.
Indeed, if the IRS wants your attention, there will be no doubt as to the legitimacy of the contact.
Unpaid salaries, pink slips: The story of lesser-known Indian BPOs
Sruthin Lal, Hindustan Times, New Delhi | Updated: Apr 18, 2016 08:17 IST
In December 2015, the Washington State Attorney General’s office sued iYogi, a technology support firm run by Indian-American Vishal Dhar, alleging that it used “deception and scare tactics to pressure consumers into buying un-needed tech support services”.
iYogi denies the charges, and is to respond to the attorney-general’s office.
New York-based iYogi has 4,000 employees and call centres in India and 10 other countries. But the company, which serves over 3-million customers, is facing financial troubles. Around 1,500 employees are said to have put in their papers after not receiving their salaries and allowances for months. iYogi, though, says the the number is much smaller.
“We have been writing emails to the CEO for months. But he is not responding,” says Vikas Dhall, a former employee. Dhall says he is to get around Rs 3 lakh from the company. Dhall’s concerns mirror those of most employees HT spoke to.
iYogi CEO Udayan Challu, however, says the company is in “a cash flow crisis” and a “difficult time in the business cycle”, and that it would get over soon.
In another instance, Zavier Nunees, an employee with Mumbai-based Teams Pvt Ltd, discovered one morning that his company, which offered technical services solution to customers in the US and UK, have shut down without any prior notice. Teams was yet to pay employees two months of their salaries .
“Most of us were undergraduates and freshers earning between Rs 9,000 to Rs 12,000. We didn’t know what to do. Nobody responded to us. We went to the police. They told us to go to court. We could not afford to do that,” says a disgruntled Nunees. He moved on, so did all his former colleagues.
For Deepak Goel, an ex-employee of a call centre in Gurgaon, the problem was compounded by the fact that he was not issued a joining letter or a contract. He lost his job in October 2014 and he is yet to get his salary arrears from the company. “Whenever I asked the owner for my salary, he abused and harassed me,” says Goel.
“We stayed till we found the promises were fake,” says Naveen Mudgal, an employee who quit iYogi. “Our families landed in a serious financial trouble.”...