RBI ordered this audit after the previous story by @reporters_co-@AJEnglish exposed that pressure from bank management to boost app registration forced staff to adopt underhand tactics, which put accounts at risk. The audit confirmed our allegations and also discovered the theft.

The aim of this special audit was to check whether accounts were registered on the app, bob World, as per rules and regulations. Turns out, far too many were not.

Audit reports of eight regions show that app sign-up forms could not be found for two-thirds of the accounts. In many cases, staff’s or banking agents’ mobile numbers were found linked with dozens of customers’ accounts each.

Many branches did not have the documents that were to be audited (such as app enrolment form), so branch staff went from door to door at the eleventh hour to get customers to sign on these forms.This amounts to forgery, say forensic accountants.

One branch employee said he and his colleagues got customers to sign the papers by scaring them that their account could get closed or that they could stop receiving government subsidies if they did not sign the documents. This trick worked on their customers– all of them villagers and many of them holders of zero-balance accounts opened under Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana. Many are illiterate and use thumbprints for signature, yet they have been registered for mobile banking.

Staff got customers to sign blank forms and filled these documents on its own. The auditors were bank employees from other branches and some were allegedly told by seniors to “cooperate”, hence they approved even the forms that were fudged in front of them.

Our first story said bank staff’s mobile numbers were fraudulently linked with customers’ accounts, which were then signed up on bob World. The bank denied this claim but after the story came out, the bank began a clean-up, which left a trail of evidence for us to follow up.

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Such internal emails and audit reports disprove every assertion Bank of Baroda made in response to our first story.

Bank employees are so frustrated with the diktats—first, to register customers on the app anyhow, then to produce consent forms anyhow—that they sent us evidence with the hope that an exposé puts an end to unethical work.

Without their help, there’d be no story. Thank you!

Major thanks to @reporters_co and @AJEnglish for giving a platform to this exposé, and to editors @anoophilip and @mbahree for moulding this story and making it ironclad. It takes a village to do investigative journalism.To read the full story, click here.

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Is such foul play only a Bank of Baroda problem? Is your bank squeaky clean? Is your money safe? To help us expose the unethical and illegal practices in banks, please donate to The Reporters’ Collective.

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