Apple India GCC Faces Red Flags over Data Backups and Audit Trails

Apple’s India Global Capability Centre (GCC), which plays a key role in supporting the tech giant’s global operations, has come under scrutiny after auditors flagged several compliance lapses, according to a report by The Economic Times.

In their review, the auditor, SR Batliboi & Associates noted that Apple Operations India Pvt Ltd failed to maintain a requirement mandated by the country's law.

The auditor reported compliance issues in the daily electronic backups of the tech giant's books of account on servers physically located in India between April and October 5, 2024.

Notably, the GCC has since introduced an automated system that now ensures daily backups are maintained as required by the law.

The auditors also raised concerns about gaps in the firm’s audit trail, an essential feature meant to preserve detailed logs of all financial transactions.

While Apple’s main accounting software does have audit trail capability and operated normally through FY25, the report pointed out that the feature was not enabled for certain changes made using privileged or administrative access.

Additionally, the audit trail for the financial year ended March 31, 2024 was not preserved as per statutory requirements.

With stricter government rules in place to improve transparency, prevent fraud and strengthen risk management, such lapses have become more significant.

Compounding these concerns, the auditors reportedly said that the management was unable to extract sufficient audit evidence from its accounting software and did not possess service organisation control reports from its third-party software providers.

As a result, it could not confirm whether the audit trail features functioned consistently across all systems or whether any tampering had occurred. The auditors, however, clarified that they did not observe any tampering in the areas where the audit trail was enabled.

Apple Operations India plays a crucial operational role for the company, handling procurement of engineering equipment, facility leases, and employing engineers for R&D hardware development activities.

The latest regulatory filings show that all of the Apple Operations India work in FY25 was for Apple’s global entities, Apple Operations International, Apple Inc, and Apple South Asia.