In the age of digital scanners the ease with which fraud can be executed is potentially dangerous for employers.

Shepherd Chitowo, Luton resident, originally from Zimbabwe therefore, no doubt, a refugee from the tyrant Mugabe, forged a certificate to enable him to by-pass studying for a year.

His mitigation was compelling – he needed to earn to support his family. Now, he has a suspended prison sentence and a debt of £50k to the NHS (his employers).

Here’s the news story from Luton on Sunday – http://www.luton-dunstable.co.uk/News/Mental-health-nurse-prosecuted.htm

Unless, you are a one-man business, it’s more or less impossible not to delegate. Because of this, there must be trust between employer and employee.

Shepherd Chitowo was described by his lawyer as “a God fearing man” who “is deeply ashamed of what he did”.

Good try. If I found out I employed someone who’d faked a certificate proving educational achievement, I cannot see how the employer/employee relationship wouldn’t be holed below the waterline. How could I delegate to that person without thinking he was cheating me?

And there are other questions: what will everyone else think, when they find out they have a colleague who not only perpetrated a fraud to get the job, but that he has succeeded in duping his boss to keep the job?

This is not about second chances, which everyone is due. This is about being a responsible employer. He’d have to go! After, that is, having followed the prescribed internal processes.

To put it in legal terms – the relationship of trust and confidence had broken down by virtue of the discovery of the forgery, therefore the dismissal would be fair.

Although this wasn’t CV fraud, I’m told this is a growth area. From an employers perspective, how do you guard against it? With difficulty. Due diligence is the only proper advice that can be given. But even then, as a matter of practicality, there is the question of time. How much time and how much detail can you reasonably spend checking out details of someone’s personal history? This is a policy issue for each employer.

In the end, you must give credence to what is presented to you, even if you do check some of the details subsequently.

Which brings us back to Mr Chitowo.

If you represent to a prospective employer that you have qualifications or experience that are discovered later to be invented, whatever the explanation or mitigation, and even if you’re excellent at the job you are hired to do, I think it’s curtains.

Of course, this may not be the whole story.

No doubt employers collude, then use what they know to be dubious work histories as a way of selecting employees to be axed. If that happens, and a claim for unfair dismissal follows, so be it. The employer has, in those circumstances, been the instrument of their own beating. Even if the employer successfully defends a claim of this kind, it will cost them money.

As with the image I’ve picked for this post, we all started out as some form of “prentice”. Short cuts may work for some, but for most of us, they don’t. Whether employer or employee.

The Hogarth image borrowed from Wikigallery here is entitled “The fellow prentices at their looms”.

Article posted on Wednesday, March, 2nd, 2011 at 10:07 am

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