According to reports, 185 employees at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters have been let go. These employees, including a number of Indians, allegedly collaborated with specific non-profit groups and abused the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) program, according to the IT major.
Apple’s Matching Grants program is a corporate social responsibility charity initiative in which the firm matches employee contributions to nonprofit organisations. According to NBC, the corporation found that staff members were collaborating with specific non-profits, some of which had ties to the Indian community, in order to fabricate their donations. After Apple matched their donations, the aforementioned employees received their initial charitable donations back. In short, as a result of the partnership, organisations kept the money that Apple donated while returning the portion that the employees contributed. This implies that the staff members only feigned to be contributing the money in order for Apple to match it. According to US law, it is tax fraud because these fictitious gifts were also utilised to obtain tax returns.
Authorities in the Bay Area have identified six employees who allegedly defrauded Apple of more than $150,000 over the course of three years through two nonprofit organisations, Hop4Kids and the American Chinese International Cultural Exchange (ACICE).
According to various media sources, some of the fired employees were Indians who defrauded Apple of money by posing as donations to non-profit organisations in Telugu. The names of these organisations and the involved staff are still pending.
