Can an Indian Company Face Legal Trouble for Denying Experience Certificates?

Experience Certificate Policy and Legal Implications

I have joined a new company recently as an HR Manager. After joining, I came to know that in this company, they do not provide experience certificates unless the employee serves a tenure of at least 5 years.

There is an employee who has served only 1.5 years in this company. Since he got a job in a foreign country, he left this job and provided a fake experience certificate to the foreign company. When that company sent a verification email to this company, the previous HR Manager in my place replied that it was fake. Although the details mentioned in it were correct, it was not provided by the company, and the employee had forged it.

Now, that employee wants an experience certificate as the foreign company has asked for it. However, our management is not willing to provide it for two reasons:

a) They do not provide the certificate before completion of 5 years.
b) The employee had committed forgery earlier.

The employee is threatening to go to court. Can he do so? Will this Indian company be penalized for not providing an experience certificate?

Note: The employee had served the notice period and has also been provided his relieving letter.

The practice of your employer not providing an experience certificate if the employee didn't complete 5 years of service is not correct. On the other hand, an ex-employee's act of submitting a fake experience certificate is also not right. They could have presented the relieving order and appointment order which were provided earlier.

If your employer doesn't want to provide an experience certificate for less than 5 years of service, then that policy should be communicated to candidates before their date of joining the company. Since you have recently joined them, you may explain to your employer the necessity of providing an experience certificate when the employee serves the proper notice period.

Employees have the right to take up the issue legally and seek legal remedy by justifying how the company's decision had a significant financial impact on their career.

It is the ordinary right of a person to get an experience certificate for the period he had. The employer cannot deny the same on a whimsical stand and call it a 'policy'. The employer is liable if taken up in a Court of Law. If taken up in a Writ Petition in the High Court, there is every possibility that the issue of the Experience Certificate could be held to be a public duty cast on the employer, though private, and hence there is a strict liability.