CBI Registers FIR Against Two Nokia Employees Over ₹19.33 Crore EPFO Fraud

The Central Bureau of Investigation has registered a case against two employees of Nokia Solutions & Networks India Pvt Ltd for allegedly siphoning off roughly Rs 19.33 crore from the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation, in what investigators describe as a carefully engineered payroll fraud.

The accused have been identified as Vaibhav Verma, who worked as Payroll Cluster Lead, and Kamaraju Mutyala, who headed Payroll Management at the company. Along with unnamed public servants and private individuals, they have been booked under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Prevention of Corruption Act, and the Information Technology Act, giving the case both a corporate fraud and a corruption dimension.

According to the FIR, the alleged fraud unfolded between 2023 and 2024, a period when Nokia was in the process of giving up its "exempted establishment" status under the EPF Act of 1952. That transition required the company to transfer years of accumulated provident fund records to the EPFO, a process that, investigators say, was quietly exploited to route money into accounts that did not belong to any real Nokia employee.

The alleged scam first surfaced after EPFO's Zonal Fraud Risk Management Committee began a preliminary inquiry, triggered by a complaint filed through the government's public grievance portal, CPGRAMS. What started as a check on 70 suspicious accounts snowballed quickly. Investigators found that 66 of those had no employer-employee relationship with Nokia at all. As the audit widened, another 28 non-genuine accounts turned up, taking the total count of fictitious beneficiaries to 94.

Nokia's own internal forensic audit zeroed in on Verma and Mutyala as the officials who processed and certified the fraudulent transfer records. It also found that documents submitted to EPFO had been deleted from their laptops soon after filing, a detail that investigators believe points to a deliberate attempt to cover tracks.

"The forensic audit detected electronic communications containing details of non-Nokia employees, false confirmations regarding employment status, and approval of KYC particulars for fake accounts using official credentials," the FIR reportedly states, laying out how the alleged manipulation was carried out from within the company's own systems.

Following the internal findings, Nokia suspended both employees and opened disciplinary proceedings. To make good the loss, the company is learnt to have deposited close to Rs 20 crore, including interest, with the EPFO.

The EPFO's own internal review did not stop at the two accused. It also flagged procedural and supervisory lapses in how Past Accumulation Statements were processed, suggesting the fraud slipped through because of gaps in verification at the EPFO's end too.

The CBI's Economic Offences Branch in Mumbai has now taken over the investigation and is working to identify everyone involved, including the public servants named in the FIR, and to trace where the embezzled money eventually went. The presence of unidentified public servants in the FIR leaves open the possibility that the fraud was not confined to Nokia's internal payroll team alone.

"Exempted establishments," companies that run their own provident fund trusts instead of routing contributions through EPFO directly, are meant to face tighter internal controls precisely because they handle employee retirement savings with less day-to-day regulatory oversight. The surrender of exempted status, as Nokia was undertaking, involves a one-time, high-value transfer of accumulated funds, a moment investigators say can turn especially vulnerable if internal checks are weak or easily overridden by a handful of employees with system access.

Inputs from ANI