Infosys Hit With French Labour Compliance Fine of €175,000 Over Time-Tracking Failures
France’s regional labour authority penalised Infosys €175,000 — roughly ₹2 crore — after inspectors found its employee working time recording system failed to meet French legal requirements. The DRIEETS Île-de-France penalty, disclosed in a BSE and NSE exchange filing on July 25, 2026, centres on three specific gaps: reliability, auditability, and monitoring capabilities for certain employee categories.
This is not a data-privacy action. It is not about how many hours Infosys employees work. The DRIEETS Île-de-France penalty is a pure workforce compliance case about whether a multinational IT employer can demonstrate, to a French labour inspector, that its time records are accurate, tamper-evident, and complete — and Infosys could not.
What DRIEETS Found and Why It Matters
Infosys received the penalty from DRIEETS Île-de-France — the Direction régionale et interdépartementale de l’économie, de l’emploi, du travail et des solidarités — for non-compliance with French legal requirements regarding working time recording systems. The communication arrived on July 24, 2026, and the company filed it with stock exchanges the following day.
The core issue relates to the technical and procedural adequacy of Infosys’ internal systems for tracking employee work hours. The authority cited concerns over the consistent accuracy of the recording system (reliability), difficulties in providing clear, verifiable records for inspection (auditability), and gaps in overseeing work hours for specific categories of employees (monitoring capabilities).
Infosys did not specify which categories of employees were covered by the findings, nor did it disclose whether the regulator had instructed it to modify or replace its existing time recording system. That silence is itself telling. For compliance officers at Indian IT firms with French operations, the absence of detail is the warning: if your system cannot withstand an audit, you may not know which employee categories are exposed until an inspector tells you.
Infosys said the penalty is not material and will not have any significant impact on its financial position, operations or other business activities. That may be true for a company of Infosys’ scale. For smaller Indian IT firms with European labour law exposure, the same type of fine can be far more consequential.
The French Legal Framework Driving This DRIEETS Île-de-France Penalty
Most wire-service coverage of this story stops at the fine amount. That leaves HR managers and legal counsel without the one thing they actually need: an explanation of the law that produced this outcome.
France has long required time tracking for hourly workers and certain salaried groups under Articles L3171-1 and L3171-2 of the Code du travail. Article L3171-1 requires employers to post the times at which work begins and ends, including rest periods. Article L3171-2 goes further: where employees do not all follow the same collective timetable, the employer must draw up documents to calculate individual working hours, compensatory rest earned, and rest actually taken.
The French 35-hour workweek audit obligations do not apply uniformly across all employee categories. Under French law, there is no general obligation on employers to monitor all employees’ working time. The French Labour Code expressly requires the daily recording of each employee’s working time where there are individualised working hours or differentiated collective working hours within the same department, or for employees with a fixed amount of working hours.
This is where the forfait jours regime becomes critical for Indian IT firms European labour law compliance. A derogatory and more flexible working time scheme exists for executives who are independent in the organisation of their work. These executives may benefit from a lump-sum remuneration agreement called “forfait-jours” based on a fixed number of working days per year — usually 218 working days. The catch: the forfait jours framework still carries hard obligations.
To be valid, collective agreements providing for forfait-jours arrangements must set out obligations to track the number of employees’ days of work and their compliance with minimum legal rest time — that is, 11 consecutive hours of rest per day and 35 consecutive hours of rest per week — and hold at least one meeting per year to discuss workload, working time organisation, and the length of working days.
The 2019 CJEU ruling in CCOO v Deutsche Bank established that all workers must have a recording mechanism, including cadres on forfait jours. The French Cour de cassation has cited CCOO in several decisions from 2021 to 2024, particularly in cases where forfait jours workers contested their workloads. Companies that failed to maintain auditable records lost on the burden of proof.
What a Compliant Working Time Recording System Actually Requires
The Infosys case is a concrete illustration of what working time recording system non-compliance looks like in practice. DRIEETS inspectors do not simply ask whether a system exists. They test whether it meets three standards that now carry the force of both the Code du travail and post-CCOO CJEU jurisprudence:
| Standard | What inspectors look for | Common failure mode |
|---|---|---|
| Reliability | Accurate, consistent, real-time capture of hours | Manual retrospective edits; spreadsheets with no version control |
| Auditability | Tamper-evident records exportable for inspection | No audit log; records editable by HR without trace |
| Monitoring | Active oversight of rest periods and hour limits per employee category | Forfait jours workers excluded from the system entirely |
A compliant system needs objective recording — real-time entry, timers, and calendar-based logging all qualify. Reliable storage is equally mandatory: records cannot be manually altered without an audit trail, and spreadsheets and paper fail this test, while a cloud-based system with proper data integrity does not.
France’s labour inspectorate — the Inspection du travail operating within DRIEETS — has broad investigative powers. The Inspection du travail enforces these obligations and can impose administrative fines of up to €4,000 per worker for record-keeping breaches, doubled for repeat offences. Recent inspections have focused on forfait jours breaches specifically in consulting, IT, and finance sectors.
The Infosys fine of €175,000 is consistent with an enforcement action spanning multiple affected employees across one or more categories, rather than a single isolated breach.
Why Indian IT Firms Face Elevated European Labour Law Risk
The Infosys penalty comes at a time when the company has been tightening its workplace attendance norms, particularly in India. After implementing a stricter return-to-office policy in 2026, the company gradually expanded in-office attendance requirements to more senior employees. That internal policy shift, however, has no bearing on the French violation. The French regulator’s action is unrelated to the number of hours employees work. It focuses on whether Infosys’ systems accurately record, monitor and maintain auditable records of working time in accordance with French labour laws.
The broader pattern matters here. Multinational workforce compliance gaps Europe-wide are accelerating as enforcement frameworks mature. Seven years after the CCOO ruling, member states are turning it into enforceable national law — and for many employers, the clock is ticking.France is not an outlier; it is an early mover. Belgium has set a mandatory time-tracking deadline of January 2027, and Germany’s electronic recording law is expected shortly after.
For Indian IT firms with operations in the Île-de-France region — where many large technology companies base their European delivery centres — employee work-hour tracking requirements France enforces are not optional add-ons to an HR system. They are a baseline legal obligation with real financial penalties attached.
What Compliance Officers Should Do Now
The Infosys fine should function as a compliance trigger for any multinational employer running employees in France under a generic or India-configured HR platform. Three actions have immediate priority.
First, audit which of your French employees sit under forfait jours versus hourly arrangements. For salaried employees on forfait jours, employers must track days worked rather than hours. A system built for hourly workers often misses this category entirely. Second, verify that your time records carry an unalterable audit trail. If an inspector asked for records for a named employee covering the past three years today, could you produce them without manual reconstruction? Third, confirm that annual workload review meetings for cadres are documented and timestamped — French courts have voided forfait jours arrangements and awarded multi-year backdated overtime simply because employers could not prove the meetings occurred.
The Infosys French labour compliance fine of €175,000 is modest relative to the company’s revenues. The compliance blueprint it reveals is not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why was Infosys fined by French labour authority DRIEETS?
DRIEETS Île-de-France found that Infosys’ employee working time recording system did not fully comply with French legal requirements. Inspectors identified shortcomings in the system’s reliability, auditability, and monitoring capabilities for certain categories of employees. The total penalty imposed was €175,000, disclosed in an exchange filing on July 25, 2026.
What is DRIEETS Île-de-France and what powers does it have?
DRIEETS Île-de-France — Direction régionale et interdépartementale de l’économie, de l’emploi, du travail et des solidarités — is the regional labour authority covering the Paris region. It oversees enforcement of the French Labour Code, can conduct workplace inspections, and has the power to impose administrative fines for violations including working time recording failures.
What does French law require for employee working time recording systems?
Under Articles L3171-1 and L3171-2 of the Code du travail, employers must maintain documents that calculate working hours, compensatory rest earned, and rest actually taken for each employee not on a standard collective timetable. Systems must be reliable, auditable, and capable of being presented to a labour inspector on demand.
Which employee categories were affected by the Infosys France penalty?
Infosys did not publicly disclose which employee categories were covered by the DRIEETS findings. The authority cited shortcomings “for certain categories of employees,” which under French law typically includes workers on individualised schedules or forfait jours arrangements — a common framework for senior IT professionals.
How does France’s 35-hour workweek rule apply to foreign multinational employers?
It applies in full. Any employer with employees working in France is bound by the Code du travail regardless of where the company is headquartered. The 35-hour week sets the legal threshold for when overtime begins; employers must maintain records showing whether each employee’s hours stay within legal limits or trigger overtime compensation and rest entitlements.
Could Infosys face further audits or fines from other European authorities?
Potentially, yes. Each EU member state has its own labour inspectorate with independent enforcement powers. A finding in France does not automatically trigger audits elsewhere, but it may prompt internal compliance reviews across Infosys’ European operations. Other jurisdictions — including Germany and Belgium — are actively tightening their own time-recording enforcement.
What is the difference between reliability, auditability, and monitoring under the French Labour Code?
Reliability means the system consistently and accurately captures working time without gaps or manual overrides. Auditability means records are tamper-evident and can be presented to an inspector in a verifiable format. Monitoring means the employer actively oversees compliance with rest periods and hour limits for each relevant employee category — not merely storing data passively.
