The Department of Justice and the FBI have won a guilty verdict against an India-born executive at a U.S. Fortune 500 company who demanded kickbacks in exchange for hiring a job-seeker.
The FBI discovered the fraud scheme after Indian-native Karan Gupta was caught in a separate fraud by his employer, Optuum Inc., which is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. The two detected frauds cost the company $1.2 million, or roughly $10 million in stock value.
“[Karan] Gupta abused his position of trust as the Senior Director of a subsidiary of the largest healthcare provider in the United States to defraud his company by hiring a ghost employee for a fictitious position, so that he could collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks over many years,” said Rick Evanchec, the FBI’s top agent in Minneapolis.
The kickbacks, featherbedding, unproductive hiring, and C-suite fraud are widespread in the U.S. white-collar economy because Wall Street investors trust executives who claim Indian graduates are more productive and profitable than 50 American professionals.
This investors’ trust in their imported Indian managers has created many corporate fraud scandals, most often within the pyramid or “layer system” of favored Indian-run staffing contractors under each Fortune 500 company.
“It is the norm with this preferred vendor system,” said John Miano, a D.C.-based lawyer who has filed several cases against the visa programs.
Migration is fentanyl to the C-suite because Wall Street valuations are driven by current earnings per share, not by innovation, productivity, professionalism, or long-term investments, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which opposes the Indian migration. He added:
In the long run, like fentanyl devastates the human body, migration devastates the corporation, and it just becomes a husk of itself … like the addict, say in the city of Philadelphia, they have to keep trying to make everything look good.
Amid the corruption, politically powerful investors still pressure federal politicians to preserve the supply of white-collar managers and workers via the government-run H-1B, J-1, L-1 visa programs, and the OPT and CPT work-permit programs. Overall, these programs keep a foreign population of almost 2.5 million in white-collar jobs — mostly in mixed-skill staffing companies — in the United States, and have delivered millions more into legal residency and citizenship.
Much of the imported fraud is shaped by the unprofessional home culture of the migrant managers and workers. The kickbacks and the black market for Americans’ jobs are hidden in covert bank transfers, strange languages, faked resumes, complex subcontracting, hidden kickbacks to more senior executives, and Americans’ utopian desire to treat foreign migrants as if they were fellow Americans.
The Justice Department reported:
In 2015, Gupta recruited and approved the hiring of a lifelong friend to work at Optum in a managerial data engineering position for which the friend was unqualified. Gupta gave the friend a false resume, which the friend used to secure the position. Gupta became his friend’s supervisor. Then, for almost four years, the friend did no work at all for Optum, all while collecting a salary that began above $100,000 and increased with raises and bonuses each year. The friend met no one else at Optum, sent almost no emails, and regularly did not log into his Optum computer for weeks on end.
At Gupta’s demand, his friend paid Gupta more than half of his unearned Optum salary in kickbacks. Gupta and the friend also agreed on a plan to conceal the kickback payments. Initially, the friend, who lived in New Jersey, would withdraw the kickback payments from his bank account in cash, using the fraud proceeds, then deposit the cash in a New Jersey branch for Gupta’s bank, so that Gupta could access the funds in California. Later, the friend opened a new checking account, designated that checking account to receive the Optum direct deposits, and sent Gupta the debit card, which Gupta then used to withdraw the fraud proceeds in cash from ATMs in California.
Criminal managers “have to make mistakes [for normal auditors] to find it,” said Lynn. “You need an attack dog [to find the fraud, and if they look], what they’re going to find … [is] that the levels of fraud, waste, and abuse will probably far exceed the $100,000 per H-1B visa [application fee] being proposed by the President.”
Breitbart has covered many similar examples of kickback corruption by Indian managers — and many examples of the vast damage done to American professionalism by the investor-backed C-Suite executives.
For example, a recent lawsuit showed how an Indian company forced an Indian worker — Amrutesh Vallabhaneni — to pay his CEO, Pavan Tata, for every stage in his years-long journey to get a green card:
In 2023, [CEO] Tata told AV he would need to work for two end clients at the same time. Tata told him that other consultants were doing it, and he was expected to do the same. For the next six months, AV worked more than 300 hours a month. Tata told AV if he didn’t do this his immigrant visa would not get approved. Tata agreed to pay him extra for this work, but SiriSoft never fully paid AV. Rather, they sent partial off-payroll payments through Zelle. They sent $2000 on December 1, 2022; $2,000 on February 3, 2023; and $3,000 on August 16, 2023. Each time SiriSoft deducted an additional 20% for “taxes.” But those deductions were not paid to any government; rather SiriSoft kept it.
The company’s extractions kept Vallabhaneni poor, despite his apparently high wages, says the lawsuit:
Despite being guaranteed a wage by the [Department of Labor], AV often barely enough money for rent and living expenses for himself and his family. Because of the broken promises and inconsistent pay, his health insurance lapsed, he missed credit card payments, and he and his wife lacked access to needed healthcare. At one point, AV suffered a serious leg injury, but he couldn’t see a doctor. He informed his HR department but Tata ignored him for months.
The prevalence of the kickback hiring system also ensures that many corporate layoffs are more likely to target Americans instead of mixed-skill Indians.
The mass hiring of cheap-labor visa workers is also a huge threat to the nation’s high-tech sector because it allows investors to train many Indians in the United States — prior to outsourcing the jobs and critical business operations to even cheaper India. One result is that the Indian-born CEOs of Google and many other companies are now investing heavily in India instead of hte United States.
Once the investment goes overseas and the jobs are outsourced, fewer Americans will have the early-career opportunities needed to become productive experts or innovative entrepreneurs.
The kickback hiring system has pushed many skilled young American graduates out of jobs, said Lynn. The result is growing political alienation among younger Americans, ensuring the election of Donald Trump in 2024 and Zohran Mamdani in 2025.
Trump is zig-zagging between his anti-migration voters and his pro-migration business allies in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections.
He says productivity and robots can replace absent migrants, but is also careful not to alienate his business-class donors who demand migrants for blue-collar and white-collar jobs. He celebrates legal immigration and dodges questions about on his concessions to business lobbies, while his deputies use their limited powers in the agencies to slow and stop many migrants without challenging the overall inflow.
Trump’s polls have fallen because “Americans think the system doesn’t work, and with every passing day, the Trump administration reinforces that by allowing powerful and connected people to escape accountability,” Mark Mitchell, the lead pollster for Rasmussen Reports, told Breitbart News.
“People are still looking to Trump for leadership because they’re desperate,” he added.
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