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BOD 153/2013Removal

A chartered accountant forged a document for a corruption-accused official. The Board took over a decade to decide.

9 min readJainam Shah

A CBI corruption probe traced a backdated document, meant to explain a hidden windfall, back to the family's chartered accountant. The Board removed him from the Register after more than a decade.

Held
RemovalGuilty of professional misconduct
Forum
Board of Discipline (First Schedule)
Clauses
Item (2) of Part IV of the First Schedule
Decided
punished
File no.
PR/04/2012/DD/34/2012/BOD/153/2013
Source
Original order (PDF)

A chartered accountant was pulled into a corruption investigation over a document meant to explain where an accused official's money had come from. The document was dated years before it was actually created.1

What happened#

A central investigating agency, probing a port health officer for wealth far beyond his known income, comes across a written agreement recording a large payment to his wife. The agreement is dated years before the investigation itself began.
The officer's usual chartered accountant has fallen ill, and the officer is referred to another accountant to get his paperwork done. Investigators come to believe that accountant prepared the agreement himself, long after its stated date, to explain money that had in fact arrived only recently.
The document surfaces not on the accountant's own office computer but on a colleague's, sent there, the agency concludes, so that it could not be traced back to him. The colleague prints it out at the accountant's request and passes it on, without reading what it contains.
The agency seizes computers, sends them for forensic examination, and takes a sworn statement from the colleague before a magistrate. It prosecutes the accountant under the penal code alongside the official and his associates, and separately reports him to the Institute.
The disciplinary case is adjourned for years at a stretch. When it finally reaches a hearing, the accountant contests the forensic findings at length, arguing his own computer had been tampered with after it was seized. The Board is not persuaded, and removes him from the Register for a month.

Three details from the record did the deciding.

The first was where the document ended up before it reached the official. The Board found the respondent had routed it not through his own printer but to a fellow chartered accountant's computer, a colleague with no stake in the matter, so that the file could never be traced back to the respondent's own system (para 18).

The second was the colleague's own account of that day. He told the Board he had taken a call from the respondent asking to borrow his printer, since his own was not working; that a staff member collected the printout the next morning without reading it; and that he later deleted an e-mail at the respondent's request, only for the CBI to seize his hard disk soon afterwards (para 17).

The third was a single line of timing, and it went against the respondent. The official under investigation told the Board he had first met the respondent only after the CBI's search of his premises had already taken place — a sequence the Board read as proof the document had been created on the respondent's computer and backdated to a date years earlier (para 19).

The charge#

  • Item (2) of Part IV — the First Schedule's catch-all for "other misconduct": conduct that discredits the profession without matching any of the Schedule's more specific items.2

The underlying conduct went well beyond a professional lapse. CBI separately prosecuted the respondent under Sections 120B, 465, 467, 468 and 471 of the Indian Penal Code, before a criminal court in Chennai, for conspiracy and forgery (para 3). That prosecution runs on its own timetable and was not before the Board; its finding covers only whether the same conduct amounted to professional misconduct under the Act.

What the respondent said#

His defence turned entirely on forensics. Investigators had linked the document to a computer in his office, but not to his own machine — it was found on a workstation used by a junior with no connection to the case, which he said proved someone else had placed it there (para 7). He pointed to the seizure record itself: his computer reached the forensic laboratory wrapped only in paper, while a colleague's machine seized the same day arrived sealed in cloth, which he argued showed his had been opened while in the agency's custody (para 8).

He also argued the timing worked against the charge, not for it. The document's own internal file identifiers carried a timestamp that, he said, predated the point at which the CBI's own case had him sending it by e-mail (para 9). No copy of any such e-mail was ever found in the sent folder of any account he used, despite the range of forensic techniques available to trace one (paras 11–12). A sworn statement of what a witness remembered years later, he argued, was no substitute for a screenshot of a sent folder — evidence the investigation never produced (para 12).

What the Board held#

The Board weighed the respondent's forensic arguments against what it had itself heard from the two witnesses, and found the arguments wanting. It recorded that his claims of tampering and planting "are not backed by conclusive evidence" (para 19), and treated the document's path — sent to avoid detection, then printed and handed over — as effectively settling who had made it.

One piece of evidence went unaddressed. The same official whose meeting date the Board relied on to fix the timing had, earlier in his own evidence, told the Board that the respondent had not prepared the document at all — that a lawyer had drafted it (para 16). The findings do not return to that statement or explain why it did not weigh against the charge.

Concluding, the Board held:

Pursuant to the detailed perusal of the documents on record and submissions made by the parties, the Board is of the view that the Complainant has been able to convince the Board that the Respondent has entered into criminal conspiracy with Dr. V.V. Sairam Babu and has thus created forged and fabricated documents in order to account for the disproportionate assets possessed by Dr. V.V. Sairam Babu in his own name and in the name of his wife (para 20)

And:

the Respondent is 'Guilty' of Other Misconduct falling within the meaning of Item (2) of Part-IV of the First Schedule to the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949 (para 21)

The order#

At the punishment hearing, the respondent did not appear. The Board had written to him a week before, offering a hearing; he answered twice by e-mail, citing his health, and asked the Board to decide on the written submissions he had already filed (para 2). It then held:

the Board decided to remove the name of [the Respondent] for a period of 30 days from the Register of Members.3

A thirty-day removal sits above a reprimand or a fine on the Board's scale of punishments — the respondent's name came off the Register itself, if only for a month.4 The Board that passed it was a two-member bench, not the three who had signed the underlying findings the month before.5 By then the case had been open for more than a decade.6

Why it matters#

This section is ours, not the Board's.

Routing something through a colleague's system does not make its origin harder to trace, only its recipient. The document reached the official only after the respondent asked a fellow accountant to print an attachment his own printer supposedly couldn't manage. If you need to send something you would rather not have traced to you, sending it through someone else's account still leaves it traceable to you.

An unrebutted piece of testimony still leaves a scar on the record. The findings never explain why the official's own account — that a lawyer, not the respondent, had drafted the document — did not weigh against the charge. Read a disciplinary order for what it actually settles, not for whether every loose thread was tied off.

Adjournments do not make an allegation disappear. Over a decade passed between the first hearing and the one that decided this case, most of it a single gap with no hearing at all. The Institute's file stays open the whole time.

This summarises a public order and links the primary source. It is general information, not legal or professional advice.

Footnotes#

  1. The complaint was referred to the Institute by Sri C. Easwaramoorthy, IPS, Superintendent of Police, CBI Anti-Corruption Branch, Chennai, in the course of investigating a separate corruption case (RC 3(A)/2009). The respondent was CA. T.M. Jeyachandran (M. No. 021939), of Chennai. The two witnesses before the Board were Dr. V.V. Sairam Babu, the port health officer under investigation by the CBI, and CA. K.P. Vasantha Kumar, a chartered accountant on whose office computer the disputed document was found. The document itself purported to record a payment from Shri V. Loganathan, a co-accused in the CBI case, to Smt. V.V. Ramani, Dr. Sairam Babu's wife. ↩

  2. Item (2) of Part IV of the First Schedule to the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949 is the Schedule's catch-all for "other misconduct" — conduct that discredits the profession without falling under any of the more specific items listed elsewhere. ↩

  3. The order's operative line names the respondent and his membership number directly: "the Board decided to remove the name of CA. T.M. Jeyachandran (M. No.021939) for a period of 30 days from the Register of Members." This page substitutes "[the Respondent]" for both; nothing else in the quotation is altered. ↩

  4. Section 21A(3) gives the Board of Discipline three kinds of punishment: reprimand, removal of the member's name from the Register for a period, and a fine — on the scale reprimand < fine < removal. This order used removal alone, for thirty days. Check the current sub-section before relying on any figure; the provision has been amended over time. ↩

  5. The findings, dated 27th August 2024, were signed by CA. Rajendra Kumar P (Presiding Officer), Ms. Dolly Chakrabarty (Government Nominee) and CA. Priti Savla (Member), all present in person at the final hearing. The punishment order, passed on 25th September 2024, was signed by a two-member Board of the same Presiding Officer and Government Nominee, appearing through video conference, without CA. Priti Savla. ↩

  6. The matter was first listed for hearing on 9th October 2013 and not heard again until 25th December 2022, both adjourned at the respondent's request. It was part-heard on 5th January 2023 and 19th April 2023, adjourned again on 23rd January 2024 for non-appearance of the parties, and finally heard and concluded on 12th June 2024. The findings were signed on 27th August 2024; the Board wrote to the respondent on 18th September 2024 offering a punishment hearing on 25th September 2024, which he did not attend, and passed the order that day. ↩

Written by Jainam Shah. Found guilty under Item (2) of Part IV of the First Schedule; the Board ordered a removal. General information, not legal or professional advice — read the order itself before relying on it.

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