Internship Programme At Serious Fraud Investigation Office(SFIO)

Overview

About SFIO

You cannot post your own application to the Serious Fraud Investigation Office. Its internship circular is addressed to the Registrars and Placement Cells of law schools, universities and the professional institutes, and the last block on the application form is a Sponsoring Authority panel carrying your institution's name, address, official seal and an authorised signatory (SFIO internship circular and application form). The rest of the eligibility list matters only after somebody in your college agrees to sign that block. What you get in return for the paperwork is a paid attachment of one to two months inside a working investigation agency, not an unpaid shadowing visit.

SFIO is not a training body that happens to take students. The Central Government established it under section 211 of the Companies Act, 2013 by a notification dated 21 July 2015, having first set the office up by a resolution in 2003, and a company's affairs reach it under section 212 when the Government assigns an investigation, including on a report of the Registrar or an Inspector under section 208 (SFIO FAQ). An intern is put inside that. The guidelines say interns are attached to various units of the office, and the circular describes officers of SFIO and its Regional Offices as the people they interact with, so the placement can be the Delhi headquarters or one of the regional offices rather than a classroom.

The circular opens by describing the office it is inviting you into: a multi-disciplinary organisation manned by experts in accountancy, forensic audit, general law, information technology, investigation, company law, capital market, Income Tax and Customs and Central Excise (SFIO internship circular and application form). That mix is the reason the programme opens to economics, commerce, law, management and computer forensics at once, and the reason a commerce postgraduate and a fifth-year law student can end up on the same corridor.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

There is no fixed annual calendar you can plan a year ahead around. The guidelines contemplate a notification every year in May with a June cut-off, but each circular has in practice carried its own date, and the notice window on the website has not always matched the letter inside it. The three most recent cycles ran as follows.

That last window has closed. There is no rolling intake behind it and no waiting list, so a student reading this outside a live cycle is waiting for the next circular rather than sending a speculative application to the office.

The slots you tick sit inside the cycle, not the calendar year. The form circulated for the last cycle listed two-month periods running from September and October 2026 through to May and June 2027, so a student applying in the middle of a cycle is choosing between the periods that remain (SFIO internship application form).

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Two separate doors lead in. One is the academic route: postgraduate and research students in economics, commerce, law, management and computer forensics, including law students in the fourth or fifth year of a five-year stream. The other is the professional route: candidates in the final year or its equivalent at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, the Institute of Cost Accountants of India or the Institute of Company Secretaries of India. The guidelines treat a foreign institution as acceptable for the academic route while keeping the programme itself open to Indian nationals only, so studying abroad is not a bar but a foreign passport is.

The filter that actually removes applicants is the marks rule. A first class degree in graduation is mandatory, and a candidate already inside a postgraduate course comes in on a high second class at graduation instead (the internship guidelines enclosed with the circular). What the guidelines never define is "consistent and excellent academic records", the phrase attached to the law-student route, so the Selection Committee is reading transcripts against a standard the scheme does not publish.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The scheme record carries no exclusion list at all. In practice three things end an application before merit is considered: a nationality other than Indian, a graduation result below the first class the guidelines make mandatory, and a form arriving without an institution's seal on the sponsoring authority block.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing about this internship renews. The guidelines set a ceiling of two months and publish no extension clause, no second-term route and no rule on applying again in a later cycle (the internship guidelines enclosed with the circular). The application form does allow more than one preference to be ticked from its list of two-month slots, but that is a scheduling choice inside one internship, not a way to run two.

What you get

Award & benefits

The internship is paid. It carries a fixed monthly stipend for the period of the internship, and the mechanism behind it is worth knowing: the money is released against a certification from the officer the intern is attached to, and SFIO meets the expenditure from its own sanctioned grants under the object head "Office Expenses" (the internship guidelines enclosed with the circular). There is no separate scholarship account, no institutional grant and nothing routed through your college.

Interns are given office space and a computer with internet access, which sounds minor until you compare it with placements that expect a student to bring a laptop into a secure building. The certificate is conditional rather than automatic: it is awarded on satisfactory completion and on submission of the end of assignment report, once the concerned SFIO official has evaluated it. The guidelines also state in terms that the internship is neither a job nor an assurance of a job at SFIO, so nothing here converts into a posting.

• Stipend: The interns will be paid a stipend of ₹7,000/- per month for the period of the internship. - Certificate of Internship: Certificates will be awarded to interns upon satisfactory completion of their internship and on submission of their end-of-assignment Report, and its evaluation by the concerned official of SFIO.
• Duration: The internship will be for a minimum period of one month and a maximum period of two months.
• Note: The internship will neither be a job nor an assurance of a job in the Serious Fraud Investigation Office.

What to prepare

Documents required

Beyond the certificates and the photograph named in the scheme record, the application form itself asks for more than most students expect. It wants an academic profile set out as a table, one row per qualification, with the course, subjects, institution, year of passing, percentage of marks obtained and division or class, and it tells you to attach self attested photocopies of the certificates behind those rows (SFIO internship circular and application form). It carries a computer proficiency grid where MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and any other software are each rated from excellent down to not conversant. It asks for special achievements, publications or experience, an area of interest in free text, and one named reference with a full address, phone number and email.

The last two fields are the ones to think about before filling anything in: the preferable period of internship, ticked from the slot list for that cycle, and the sponsoring authority block. The Declaration of Secrecy does not go in with this form. It is furnished separately, before the internship begins.

Step by step

How to apply

The route runs through your institution, not around it. SFIO writes to Registrars and Placement Cells asking that the programme be circulated and that the names of interested students be sent back in the enclosed format, together with the time of year that suits the student and the duration their academic curriculum permits. Your completed form, with the sponsoring authority block signed and sealed, goes back the same way.

The circular is also published on the SFIO website as a dated notice, and the notice page is the only place that states a cycle's window in plain text. The 2026-27 notice ran from 11 June 2026 to 10 July 2026 (SFIO notice, 2026-27), and the covering letter enclosed inside it carries a different last date for receipt of applications from the one in that notice's own date field. Where the two disagree, the letter is the document SFIO signed and issued, so read it rather than a job board's summary of it.

There is no online portal, no registration number and no application status page for this programme. Following up means writing to a person. Each circular names the officer who issued it, with a landline and an sfio.nic.in email address, and the 2026-27 letter was signed by a Senior Assistant Director (Admin). Because your form travelled through your placement cell, that cell is the faster first check on whether it was actually sent; the office comes second. Watch the notices section of sfio.gov.in for the next cycle rather than waiting for a mail from the college.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Applications received against the notification are scrutinised by a Selection Committee, and its composition is unusually senior for an internship. The Director of SFIO chairs it. The other members are a Joint Secretary (Admin) from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, an Additional Director of SFIO and the Deputy Director (Admin), with a nominee standing in if the Joint Secretary is unavailable (the internship guidelines enclosed with the circular). Selection is on merit, and the guidelines describe no interview, no written test and no weighting formula.

Two constraints then decide the outcome. Offers of appointment go out subject to the availability of slots as well as the committee's recommendation, and the guidelines cap the number of interns undergoing the internship at any given time at six, in the same clause that says the programme stays open through the year. Open all year and open to you this month are therefore two different things. Separately, any or all provisions of the scheme may be modified with the approval of the Secretary, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, which is how an occasional exception gets made without the published guidelines changing.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

A Declaration of Secrecy has to be furnished before the internship commences, and it is the term that shapes the whole engagement. SFIO investigations are live proceedings under the Companies Act, so an intern who sees a case file has no route to writing about it afterwards. That has a practical consequence students rarely think through: your dissertation, your LinkedIn post and your placement interview all have to describe the experience without the material.

Two obligations close the internship out. The intern presents an assignment report on the allotted subject to the Director of SFIO at the end of the term, and gives written feedback on the programme (the internship guidelines enclosed with the circular). The certificate follows the report rather than the attendance, and the guidelines repeat that nothing in the arrangement is a job or an assurance of one.

Get help

Contact

SFIO Headquarters shares an address with its Delhi Regional Office at the 2nd Floor, Pt. Deendayal Antyodaya Bhawan, CGO Complex, Lodhi Road, New Delhi 110003, on landline 011-24369242, with the Director's office on a separate line (SFIO Contact Us). The other regional offices are at Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata, each with its own address and number on the same page.

For the internship specifically, use the officer, landline and sfio.nic.in address printed at the foot of the circular for the cycle you are applying to. Those details change from one circular to the next, so an email address copied from an older listing may go nowhere.

Source

Official links

Frequently asked questions

From the official scheme FAQ (myScheme)

Read this

Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Scheme details are compiled from myScheme, the Government of India’s official scheme-discovery platform, and are reproduced without alteration. Amounts, deadlines and eligibility change between cycles, so always confirm on the official links above before applying. Expertie does not process applications or charge fees.

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