Recruiters are being urged to verify employee qualifications directly with education establishments after a bogus dentist with no qualifications managed to work as a dentist for 9 years. Vinisha Sharma used a forged degree certificate from the Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar, India to claim she had a Bachelor of Dental Surgery degree. The bogus degree enabled her to register with the General Dental Council (GDC) and then secure employment in 7 NHS hospitals.
Sharma’s fraud was only discovered after a consultant who worked with her raised concerns about her lack of skills and knowledge prompting the GDC and NHS Counter Fraud Service to investigate. They found that the Indian education establishment where she claimed to have studied had no record of her graduating or ever attending.
“This case illustrates perfectly why employers and recruitment firms need to make qualification checks directly with education establishments, no matter how highly qualified or experienced someone may seem, says Barry Hetherington, Director of employment screening firm Know Your Candidate. With Internet diploma mills producing very convincing copies of degree certificates the only way to be 100% sure a candidate has the qualifications they claim is to contact the relevant education establishment directly.”
“Unfortunately, this form of fraud is allowed to continue as the vast majority of recruitment firms continue to only make brief visual checks of certificates handed to them at an interview. With so many different certificate designs and fraudsters becoming adept at re-producing security features accurately it is impossible to know if the certificate you are looking at is a fake.”
“While not all candidates with fake qualifications are going to be working in positions where the public’s health is at risk as in this case, employers will still incur the considerable costs of having to remove and replace those candidates once discovered. The other side to this story of course is that genuine candidates who have studied to obtain the relevant qualifications are being unfairly denied opportunities their hard work deserves.”
“Verifying qualifications at source can prove time consuming, especially when the education establishment in question is based overseas. Know Your Candidate’s qualifications check service takes the leg work of out of the process for recruiters, saving valuable time and most importantly provides certainty they are recruiting a genuinely qualified candidate.”
