Indian-American owned IT cos fined for pay fraud

Washington, May 2: An Indian-American owned IT company in California was on Wednesday asked to pay $173,044 in wages to 12 of its foreign employees, most of them from India, who were paid salaries well below the levels required under the H-1B programme.

Investigations carried out by the US Department of Labour’s Wage and Hour Division revealed that some of the H-1B employees that information technology provider Cloudwick Technologies Inc. brought from India with promised salaries of up to $8,300 per month instead received as little as $800 net per month.

Based out of Newark in California in the famed Silicon Valley, Indian-American Mani Chhabra is the founder and CEO of the Cloudwick Technologies, as per the company’s website.

It describes itself as leading provider of bimodal digital business services and solutions to the Global 1000. Its services include big data, cloud, advanced analytics, business intelligence modernisation, data science, big data pilot-to-production, IoT, mobile application development.

According to the company, its clients include the likes of Bank of America, Comcast, JP Morgan, NetApp, Target, Visa, and Walmart. Investigators found that the company paid impacted employees well below the wage levels required under the H-1B programme based on job skill level, and also made illegal deductions from workers’ salaries. PTI