A payroll fraud has surfaced inside the Mumbai Police, where ₹6.41 crore was paid as salaries to ten people who were never employees, according to an FIR registered at Samta Nagar police station.
The payments were made in two windows — December 2019 to February 2020, and June to September 2020 — and came to light during a transfer of payroll records for the North Regional Division, where ten non-police personnel were repeatedly shown as staff and drew monthly salaries into bank accounts opened in their names.
Ten fictitious names are listed in the FIR: Ramdas Bhogle, Sudhakar Kadam, Sarju Yadav, Bhagwat Bhosale, Gunaji Khavkar, Mahadev Haldankar, Rajendra Sonar, Uttam Thorat, Suryakant Patil and Pandurang Kadam.
Five officials posted at the time are named: former administrative officers Ramkishan Goswami, Nagesh Talvadekar and Vijaya Chavan, Head Clerk Ajay Rathod, and Senior Clerk Amol Meshram. They have been booked under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for cheating, forgery, criminal breach of trust and criminal conspiracy. Vijaya Chavan and Amol Meshram have been suspended, with allegations that they created fake Service IDs and Defined Contribution Pension Scheme (DCPS) IDs that enabled salaries to be paid out.
A number that does not quite add up
Before anything else, the headline figure deserves scrutiny, because on its face it implies something impossible.
₹6.41 crore divided by ten names is ₹64.1 lakh per person. Spread across the seven months the payments are reported to cover, that is roughly ₹9.2 lakh per person per month — far above anything a clerical-level appointee in a police division would draw, including allowances.
Three explanations are plausible and none has been stated publicly. The loss figure may aggregate more than take-home pay, pulling in dearness allowance, arrears, leave encashment or employer pension contributions under DCPS. The payment windows may be wider than reported. Or the count of fictitious employees may be larger than the ten listed, with the payroll entries extending over a longer period.
This matters beyond curiosity. The composition determines both the recoverable amount and which offences are most apt, and it is the question the investigating officer will have to answer from the payment files. Readers should treat ₹6.41 crore as the department's preliminary quantification rather than a settled figure.
How the fraud worked
On the account given, ministerial-level clerical staff fabricated attendance registers and other official records to create employees who did not exist, then added outsiders to the payroll. Two identifiers were needed for each: a Service ID to make the person appear on the establishment roll, and a DCPS ID to route pension contributions — which simultaneously created a documentary record attesting to that person's employment.
The named offences map onto the mechanics rather than being boilerplate. Cheating covers the inducement to pay; forgery covers the fabricated registers and records; criminal breach of trust covers the misapplication of funds entrusted to those officials by virtue of their position; criminal conspiracy covers the agreement between them.
What is being described is not a systems failure so much as a custody failure. The payroll master file was maintained inside the unit that benefited, and the checks that should sit above it were largely supervisory: a superior approving a summary rather than an itemised comparison against source data.
Why transfers expose this kind of fraud
The discovery is instructive precisely because it was accidental. Payroll fraud of this type is most often uncovered by a change of custodian — a records transfer, a new commanding officer, a system migration or an audit that counts heads against payments rather than against paperwork.
Once a file passes to someone who did not build it, questions get asked that the original custodian would not ask: does this name appear on the muster roll, does the person have a service photograph, why does this Service ID have no joining report?
That is also the cheapest control to implement deliberately. A periodic reconciliation run by a unit other than the one maintaining the roll costs almost nothing and would have surfaced this within months rather than years.
The exposure is larger than salary
The DCPS angle deserves separate mention, because it converts a past loss into a future one. A fabricated service record is not just a payment instruction; it is a durable identity inside the establishment's own documentation.
Used later, that record can support claims for pension, gratuity or leave encashment, or can corroborate other identity documents. Recovering ₹6.41 crore is therefore only part of the work — corroborating the elimination of every fake service record is the other part, and it is the part that is easy to overlook once the criminal case is filed.
A six-year gap
The payments were made between late 2019 and 2020. The FIR is dated 2026. Three of the five accused are described as former administrative officers, which raises practical questions about departmental proceedings against people no longer in service, even where criminal liability is unaffected.
Time also degrades the audit trail: bank mandate forms, attendance registers and the memory of who actually authorised each payment become harder to establish with each year, and responsibility for proving who operated the ten accounts rests on that trail.
Chavan and Meshram have been suspended on conditions that include a bar on private employment or business, periodic declarations as a condition of subsistence allowance, and a prohibition on leaving the Brihanmumbai jurisdiction without permission. Those terms are standard administrative measures rather than findings, and the presumption of innocence applies to all five accused.
Controls that would have caught it
This is the recurring control set for large manual payrolls, whether in government or in a company:
- Duplicate analytics. The single highest-yield test: scan the payment file for repeated bank account numbers, addresses, contact details or identity attributes across different employee records.
- Three-way reconciliation. Match sanctioned strength against headcount against paid records each month, ideally automated, and escalate differences rather than reporting them.
- Independent verification of the addition and deletion events. Every new Service ID and every removal should be authorised at a level above the unit maintaining the roll.
- Direct confirmation of mandates. Verify bank account changes with the bank rather than through the same officer who submitted them.
- Segregation of duties. The person maintaining attendance should not be the person preparing payment instructions, and neither should approve them.
- Biometric or independent attendance. Attendance should be captured against a source the payroll clerk does not control, since fabricated attendance registers are the entry point in most variants of this fraud.
- Rotation. Long tenure in payroll administration without rotation removes the cheapest detection mechanism available.
What happens next
The immediate investigative question is identity: who the ten purported employees were, and who operated the accounts receiving the salaries. Those answers determine whether this was a small group enriching associates or something broader, and how much is realistically recoverable.
Reported timelines in similar cases suggest the criminal trial will run well behind the departmental inquiry, and the arithmetic discrepancy noted above is likely to be revisited as the payment files are examined.
Sources
- Reporting from Mumbai, 4–5 August 2026: ₹6.41 crore paid as salaries to ten fictitious employees of Mumbai Police; detection during a transfer of payroll records in the North Regional Division; the two payment windows of December 2019 to February 2020 and June to September 2020; the ten names recorded in the FIR; the five officials named and their roles at the time; charges under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for cheating, forgery, criminal breach of trust and criminal conspiracy; suspension of Vijaya Chavan and Amol Meshram over the creation of fake Service IDs and DCPS IDs, with the stated suspension conditions; ongoing investigation into the identities of the ten purported employees and the operation of their bank accounts.
- Note: the derived figures of ₹64.1 lakh per fictitious employee and approximately ₹9.2 lakh per month are the author's calculations from the reported loss and stated payment windows, presented to flag an inconsistency rather than to assert an amount. Analysis of the arithmetic, the role of the DCPS record, detection triggers and the control recommendations is the author's and not that of Mumbai Police or the investigating agency. All five accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty; this article reports allegations contained in the FIR.
