Professional Information Verification

By Henry Bagdasarian

Professional information verification before a partnership is formed as it relates to employment applications and service provider claims is one of the best ways to detect employment fraud and ensure service provider integrity in order to protect personal and business assets.

There are many reasons why a job applicant may lie in the resume or the employment application but the applicant takes the risk of getting caught for lies in order to get the job thinking that without the lie he or she may not be able to secure the job which may be a true or false supposition.

One of the widespread employment application lies is using the stolen information of someone else such as name, work authorization visa, or personal identification number such as the SSN in the US. This lie is often necessary if the person is not legally authorized to work in the country.

The second employment application lie relates to employment history such as employment dates, companies worked, past job duties, and job titles. Some people may inflate past tiles, increase dates of employment, and create imaginary employers to be viewed as more appealing to employers than other candidates.

The third lie relates to education and professional certifications. For example, if the job requires a certain degree and certification, the applicant makes something up and lies about his education and training to secure the job.

Sadly enough, employment candidates sometimes don’t think that they are lying in their job applications. For example, if they have passed the CPA exam but have not satisfied the other requirements such as work experience to obtain the certified status, they claim to be CPAs in their applications. Even worse, knowing that their professional certificate has expired or has become inactive because they have failed to meet the annual requirements, they still claim to be an active certified member of a certain professional organization.

Identity Management Institute often receives professional information verification requests from employers or their affiliates to check the status of a job applicant’s certification status. Believe it or not, some applicants under verification have never even become members of IMI, taken the examination, or received the certification status. How would a potential employer think of a candidate who gets caught lying in the application? The person would probably have the honor to join the black list of that company for a foreseeable future.

In other cases, potential customers check on the membership and certification status of service providers who advertize on their websites that they are members and supporters of Identity management Institute. Sadly enough, some service providers lie on their websites about their professional affiliations thinking that it will benefit them by gaining the trust of the public, but this thinking is flawed and works again them because once customers find out about their public lies, they turn to someone else for help and don’t look back for a very long time.

I can understand why a person who is not authorized to legally work in the country may resort to identity theft and lie about his employment authorization to get a job out of desperation, but I have a harder time understanding the justification of a service provider lying about their professional affiliations to attract customers which is a deceitful act.

Honesty is the best way to go in most cases. It’s more beneficial in the long run to spend the required time and resources to build experience, education, professional relationships with well known organizations, and pursue training and certification if a person or service provider is dedicated to a long term relationship with potential clients and employers.

Although most people and organization are honest, employment application and professional information lies will not stop any time soon. Accordingly, employers and clients are encouraged to perform professional information verification before making a business decision that they might regret later on. Use internal or external professional services to contact the appropriate employer, university, and professional organization to verify degrees, certifications, memberships, experience and any other information reported by candidates and businesses.  This is probably the best partnership investment before hiring or doing business with the person.

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