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I just read a great, albeit long article in my current edition of Fortune Magazine about fraudster Barry Minkow.  This story has it all: from love, crime, betrayal, corporate greed, personal greed and rags to riches, to prison stripes!   A simple blog posting will not do this story  justice. Fortune did a great job, Kudos to the author, Roger Parloff.

Why am I writing about it and what does it have to do with background screening, employment checks, criminal searches, credit reports or anything to do with background checks? One sentence, captured me to read on and think about our industry and the current debate of criminal recidivism.  That sentence; “His story is hard to read without pondering the question; Is Character Destiny?”  Is it?  I don’t know, I don’t think it is overall.(Character being your destiny) I mean it’s a strong general statement and could unintentionally stereotype some ex-criminals.  Is Character Destiny? It really begs the question; if you have a previous record and you just have the type of character that says, “Let’s make a quick buck. Do it the easy way and break the law,” do you have any chance at redemption?  It plays into what many of us in the industry argue all the time; there are just some bad people out there, period.

I promise, I will get to the link.  One more thing that caught my eye and that definitely ties him to the employment screening industry was one of his past side businesses.  In 2008, Minkow created a business that would comb through databases looking for inflated educational credentials on the part of corporate officers.  Great idea, right?  Sounds like he could have been a pioneer in the screening industry, one of us, one of the good guys!!  Well, he took this a step further.  When he found a discrepancy he would short the stock, leak the story to a reporter and when the priced dipped, make a nice profit.  He exposed resume embellishments at more than a dozen companies, including MGM Mirage, Broadcom and EchoStar.   Yeah, not one of us, not one of the good guys….not so much!

Okay, as promised, Click here to read the full story!

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Last year, we posted a story about a man, Adam Wheeler, who faked his way in to Harvard University by falsifying his student application.  He claimed that he had attended an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Harvard actually admitted him and was publicly embarrassed when the truth came out.

Wheeler was charged criminally in the matter, convicted and sentenced to two and a half years in prison and 10 years of probation.  He served 1 month prior to his trial and was released thereafter.

Well, according to CBSNews Wheeler is back at it again.  This time, he is looking for a job and indicated on his resume that he graduated from Harvard.  This was a violation of the terms of his probation and he’s now back in the slammer.

I know I’m not supposed to have a sense of humor about these things, but this is funny.  The truth is, if Wheeler was smart enough to fake his way into Harvard, conceivably, he might have been smart enough to get in on his own merits. I guess he didn’t take the school’s motto, Veritas (which means truth) very seriously.

Now back to serious.  Make sure you conduct education verifications and employment verifications before you hire someone.  People lie.  It happens all the time.  Performing these searches is your greatest tool for highlighting resume lies.

Check out Wheeler’s story below.

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We’ve just posted a guest article on EmployeeScreen University about the efficacy of resumes in today’s marketplace authored by Kevin W. Grossman, Chief Marketplace Evangelist at Fisher Vista, LLC and HRmarketer.com Check it out.

Okay, it’s not dead yet, but I want it to die.

I understand that there’s still a huge part of the career management industry keeping it alive, making it better and making it work for you, the job seeker. To all my friends in this industry, please forgive me, as I also understand it’s probably not going anywhere for years to come.

But I still want the painfully ubiquitous resume to die a horrible death.

Why? Because it’s a self-serving piece of inconsistently formatted and fudged professional drivel that really doesn’t help me hire true quality of fit. Just ask any background screening firm that does employment and education verifications. For example, EmployeeScreenIQ’s research yields a 52% discrepancy rate between what an applicant claims about their education and work experience and what they find when they verify such information.

Fifty-two percent. Sure, the resume helps me sift and sort to the short list, but a short list that’s almost half fabrication on the average. And if you as the job seeker take that risk and blatantly lie or embellish on your resume, and my background screening firm uncovers it, you are out of luck at a time of high unemployment where you really need a little luck.

Yes, embellishing the truth is fabrication. It doesn’t make it any better than an outright lie, especially if you’re telling me you’ve been programming native iPhone apps for the past six months and you really only took an online course six months ago and made one farting app, one that isn’t very good anyway because it sounds like a Yorkshire Terrier barking.

So what then do we put instead of this black magic resume full of lies and deceit?

Your professional online profile, of course. Like the one you better have completely up to date on LinkedIn, where thousands of recruiting professionals are scouring and sourcing every day. (And I’m not even talking about the majority of recruiting pros who search for online information about you across the internet and other social networks.) And by the way, much of the same advice you may get about building your resume applies to the online profile as well.

However, I get the fact that anybody can fudge an online profile just as well as they can a resume. But, there’s a peer pressure element of keeping one another honest in an online community where your professional history is available to everyone you’re connected with, many of whom you‘ve worked with or for at one time, if not currently, as well as the portion that’s available for public consumption if you so choose.

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Somebody didn’t do their homework…

A London man was able to gain employment as the Deputy CEO of a Middle Eastern bank after a headhunting firm located his fictitious resume online.  His resume claimed degrees from both Harvard and Oxford as well as long term employment at one of the world’s top financial institutions – J.P. Morgan.  The headhunters forwarded the resume to their client who promptly interviewed and hired the fraudster.  It was only after they had flown him to the Middle East to meet their wealthiest clients that they discovered his lies.

A few simple inquiries into this person’s past prior to a job offer would have saved this bank a little bit of money and a lot of embarrassment.

Fraudster conned his way to top bank job

A conman used a fake CV to trick his way into becoming the £165,000-a-year deputy chief executive of a City investment bank, a court heard.

By Paul Cheston, Courts Correspondent – London Evening Standard – 1/31/2011

Peter Gwinnell, 49, posted a résumé online which claimed he had degrees from Oxford and Harvard and had worked for JP Morgan for 20 years.

The fake was enough to convince City headhunters Connaught Partners to put him in touch with Ahli United Bank, which was looking for a new deputy chief executive, in the autumn of 2009. Gwinnell played the role of senior banker so well that after two interviews he was appointed to the job.

He worked for a month, flying out to the Middle East several times to meet wealthy clients and collecting £14,500 in salary. It was only when Ahli ran extra checks that it realised Gwinnell’s story was a lie.

In reality he was a convicted conman who had served six months in prison in the Nineties and had not attended either university, or worked at JP Morgan. Gwinnell, of Harrow, admitted a single count of fraud and was handed a 50-week prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, at Southwark crown court. Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC spared him an immediate jail term after hearing he had already spent 12 weeks in custody on remand, and was suffering from serious depression.

The judge instead ordered Gwinnell to complete 100 hours of unpaid work, 18 months of supervision with a probation officer and to continue to undergo treatment for his depression.

He also banned him from uploading a CV onto the internet without the court’s permission. Sentencing, he told Gwinnell: “Somehow or other you managed to convince Connaught Partners that you were a suitable candidate for employment by the bank.

“This offence was deliberately planned, and it caused loss, but also no doubt much trouble and aggravation, and quite obviously embarrassment to the bank who determined that you were suitable for employment.”

The court heard that even after Gwinnell was questioned by police, he sent a fraudulent CV to a Swiss bank before withdrawing the job application.

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Bragging to your buddies about your days in the trenches doesn’t hurt anyone or anything, unless of course they find out you’re a big fat liar and your ego gets bruised.  Masquerading these lies as expertise and profiting from it, on the other hand, has a tremendously adverse effect on those supposed to benefit from your instruction – especially when those people are federal, state and local law enforcement agencies who need this knowledge in the event of an attack or disaster. 

This story can be added to our ever growing list of why you have to background check before you let someone in the front door.

Maryland Man Arrested for Allegedly Lying About Military Service

By Edmund DeMarche, FoxNews.com – 01/26/2011

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Question: What do United Airlines Pilot, Dr. William Hamman and I have in common?

Answer: We are both not cardiologists or any other type of doctor for that matter.  However, one of us pretended to be. And that person is not your favorite background screening blogger.  Stop me if you’ve seen this movie.

A.P.: Pilot Duped AMA with Fake M.D. Claim

He seemed like Superman, able to guide jumbo jets through perilous skies and tiny tubes through blocked arteries. As a cardiologist and United Airlines captain, William Hamman taught doctors and pilots ways to keep hearts and planes from crashing.

He shared millions in grants, had university and hospital posts, and bragged of work for prestigious medical groups. An Associated Press story featured him leading a teamwork training session at an American College of Cardiology convention last spring.

But it turns out Hamman isn’t a cardiologist or even a doctor. The AP found he had no medical residency, fellowship, doctoral degree or the 15 years of clinical experience he claimed. He attended medical school for a few years but withdrew and didn’t graduate.

His pilot qualifications do not appear to be in question — he holds the highest type of license a pilot can have, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman said. However, United grounded him in August after his medical and doctoral degrees evaporated like contrails of the jets he flew. He resigned in June as an educator and researcher at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., after a credentials check revealed discrepancies, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Doctors who worked with the 58-year-old pilot are stunned, not just at the ruse and how long it lasted, but also because many of them valued his work and were sad to see it end.

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Just asking, but wouldn’t a thorough employment background check have uncovered this charade?  I imagine that performing an Education Verification with the medical school or performing a Professional License Check might have done the trick.

Note to United.  I hope that this post in no way, shape or form compromises my frequent flier status or upgrade request I recently made with your airline.  I love to fly the friendly skies!

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The use of fake academic degrees is becoming epidemic.  There are now an estimated 5,000 diploma mills throughout the world selling bogus academic credentials in exchange for money and little or no coursework (see my phony PhD above).  In just the last decade alone, this industry has accounted for over $1 billion in sales.

And our UK-based strategic partner, Verifile Ltd. has an interesting take on why the industry continues to grow. Check out this excerpt from their latest release.

Ahead of tomorrow’s House of Commons vote on tuition fees, CV verification and background screening expert, Verifile Limited, is concerned that an increase in tuition fees will lead to an increase in bogus universities and push more people to buy fake degrees from the criminals who run these organisations.

Verifile Limited owns Accredibase™, the world’s largest database of fake universities, or “degree mills”. Since the release of the company’s comprehensive report in January*, the number of confirmed bogus institutions** claiming to operate from the UK, has risen by an alarming 24%, taking the number of degree mills to 337 in the UK alone. In addition, a further 219 institutions are suspected mills and are currently under investigation. The majority of suspected mills are later confirmed as bogus upon completion of the investigation.

“It is hard to believe that candidates are not aware of what they are doing when they originally purchase their ‘degrees’ without taking classes or sitting in exams, yet tens of thousands of individuals are using degrees purchased from degree mills over the internet. And you find them from all walks of life from IT to security, health, education, management, government and more. If tuition fees are to increase, we must expect the incidence of fake degrees to also rise. Where the Government is not prepared to fight this problem effectively, it would be advisable for organisations to be more thorough when they carry out background checks” concluded Ben Cohen.

View Full Release

Of course, employers can limit the possibility of this happening by taking the following steps:

• Always check the accreditation status of the university.  Lack of accreditation doesn’t always mean that a school is phony, but it might lead to other questions.
• Conduct an Education Verification as part of your standard employment background check

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Move over Marilee Jones, you have some company.  For those of you who don’t remember, Marilee Jones was the Director of Admissions at M.I.T. and was caught lying on her resume a few years back.  Colleges and Universities have long been known for their lax approach to screening employees, fortunately in the last few years many of them have stepped up their efforts.  The latest blunder has Texas A&M University reviewing its current hiring practices after an administrator now admits lying on his resume.

Ex-A&M administrator admits lying on resume

BRYAN, Texas — A former Texas A&M University administrator who quit in June amid questions about padding his resume has pleaded guilty and been fined $2,000.

Alexander Kemos on Wednesday pleaded guilty in Bryan to a misdemeanor charge of using a fraudulent, substandard or fictitious degree. He also must pay court costs.

Kemos attorney Jim James says his client admits adding to his resume in violation of the law and regrets the incident. James says the 50-year-old Kemos also says no one at A&M knew of the false portions of his resume.

Kemos, who was hired in 2009, was senior vice president for administration. He falsely claimed to be a former Navy SEAL with advanced degrees from Tufts University.

A&M is auditing its hiring practices.

Full Story

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Here’s an interesting take on how a company can use terminated employee’s resume lies as a defense against claims of discrimination and, or retaliation. Check out this post by labor and employment attorney Jeffrey T. Rosenberg. The only catch seems to be that if you knew about the resume fraud after conducting an employment background check and still hired this person, the defense probably goes out the window. Then again, if you knew about it, why would you hire them?

As an employment attorney practicing in New York City, I feel obligated to clarify the negative consequences that can occur as a result of lying on a resume. Most cases concerning falsified resumes arise from situations in which an employee has been terminated for reasons other than lying on his or her resume (ex. poor work performance). After being terminated, the employee commences a lawsuit for unlawful discrimination and/or retaliation, and during discovery, the employer discovers for the first time that the employee’s resume that was submitted with the original job application had been falsified and is fraudulent.
Because the evidence of the resume fraud was first discovered after the termination had already occurred, this new information is called “after-acquired evidence,” and can be used by the employer as a defense to the claims of discrimination and/or retaliation.

In fact, in Quinby v. WestLB AG (2007), the Southern District of New York (federal court covering Manhattan) held that a plaintiff will not be entitled to certain remedies, such as reinstatement and front pay, if the employer can show that it would have terminated the employee anyway based on information that was not acquired until after she was terminated. However, the party asserting the “after-acquired evidence” defense must establish that the wrongdoing was of such severity that the employee would have been terminated on those grounds alone if the employer had known of it at the time of the termination.

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