Fast Track: Sorting out the bad pennies

With employees embellishing their CVs or committing fraud, businesses are turning to private investigators. By Stephen Overall

A lot of employee-vetting is hunch, nose and intuition, says Richard Jacques-Turner, a specialist employee investigator in charge of Paragon Investigations International, based in Hull. "If you've got a senior executive living in a tip or a cleaner with a serious casino habit, you will want to know why, and nine times out of ten, there will be something that the client should know," he says.

Not necessarily, logic dictates. The executive may have taken a vow of Franciscan austerity; the cleaner may be the beneficiary of a cranky, but loaded, aunt. But that is precisely the point, counters Jacques-Turner. "We would ask whether it makes them a less suitable employee and whether it is going to affect their work. Mistakes in recruitment can destroy businesses."

Whether or not employers have any right to know personal - and often uncomfortably personal - details about their employees' lifestyles and quirks is something of a redundant question. They certainly feel that they do have the right, and can afford to find out. As a result, employers are widely believed to be turning to employee-vetting to help them.

In the murky world of employee-vetting, every member of staff is a potential risk. Every habit, however colourful, wacky or humdrum, is a potential embarrassment. Vetting is not the sort of thing that employers will admit to, and certainly not the sort of thing that anyone keeps figures about.

Norman Smith, a former president of the Association of British Investigators, reckons that pre-employment screening is bread-and-butter work for most private detectives. Often, he says, it is just applicants for very senior, sensitive positions who are vetted; in other companies it is just those applying for graduate, managerial jobs. Few, outside the Home Office, are sufficiently paranoid to vet all applicants.

There are two major types of investigation - "up-front" and covert. The four detectives I spoke to all said that up-front investigations were far more justifiable, thorough and satisfactory, because the information is readily available and there is a chance to clarify things without the risk of breaking any laws.

For example, if someone put on their CV that they had a degree from the University of Bristol, the obvious route of inquiry - seeking confirmation from the university - is shut off, because Bristol refuses to supply such data under the belief - erroneous as it happens - that it would be breaking the data protection laws. If the subject knows they are being investigated, they can just provide a certificate which can then be verified.

Usually, all checks start with publicly available databases. The electoral roll is a beginning, followed by checks on birth certificates, marriage certificates, driving licences, passports, qualifications and County Court judgments and company directorships. Finances can be checked through credit reference bureaux, such as Equifax and Info-link, which are available online for a subscription, while databases such as BT's Phonebase give details of any change of address.

Then, if anything is amiss, the investigation can go into something called a "lifestyle audit". Invariably, according to the detectives, the areas that repay closest attention are those which have anything to do with the two raciest of the Seven Deadly Sins: money and sex.

"People are not that clever," says Jacques-Turner. "With modern desk- top publishing systems, it is easy to knock up a false certificate, but they don't think about the reference number. So, somewhere along the line the chain breaks down.

"I had one case of a completely false identity where everything seemed in order: birth certificate, marriage certificate and mortgage details. But the thing which really gave him away was the simple lack of information available on him."

Most recruitment, of course, remains an exercise in the benefit of the doubt. The chances of employers having the time to bother checking A-level results or membership of obscure professional bodies are remote. Which leads to the common tendency to embellish the truth with encouraging additions to CVs - a couple of extra GCSEs, or fiddling exact dates to camouflage a period of redundancy.

According to a study by one detective agency, Network Security, one in four people working in the City of London claimed to have lied on a job application.

Mike Hinds, chairman of the Association of Search and Selection Consultants, says that with rising suspicion of "CV abuse", superficial levels of vetting are undoubtedly increasing. But beyond requiring proof of qualifications and a medical history, further research remains rare.

"Telling the individual that checks will be made is a check in itself," he says. "Employers have the right to enquire only into the aspects that are relevant to the performance of the job. People have a right to privacy and most employers would hate anyone to intrude into their own affairs."

Figures that show that about 75 per cent of fraud is carried out by existing employees would point to the need for checks. In addition, there has been some official encouragement to employers' prying. In a 1997 report on IT security, the Audit Commission said that less than 10 per cent of organisations carry out any vetting, and urged more firms to take it up. It pointed out that a quarter of all IT frauds are committed by someone in a managerial position.

Praesidium, which operates in the telecoms sector, is a company that is marketing a new form of participatory employee vetting, at the cost of about 7.5 per cent of the first year's salary (see panel). The investigation aims to uncover inconsistencies, but only those that could prove embarrassing to the employer are included in the final report.

Nick Mann, the company's operations director, gives an example: "If, in the course of our investigations, we discovered that someone was gay but that they were not open about it, we would want to know why they wanted it to be a secret, and we would ask the following questions. Is what the subject does a risk? Is how much or how they do it a risk? Would the fact be an embarrassment to the employer? Is the fact or factor financially expensive? Chances are, the answers to these questions are all no, so it wouldn't be an issue."

Of course, many of these questions are subjective matters, for the judgement of the investigator, and would be enough to send any bashful homosexual, justifiably concerned about the bigotry of the corporate world, scuttling for the closet. But Mann emphasises that the investigation is entirely confidential and is done with the support of the subject.

He concedes, though, that if anyone refused vetting, conclusions might be drawn about what the subject had to hide. Job prospects might be duly harmed.

The Association of British Investigators (0181-546 3368)

The Open Vetting Process

THE BOYS at Praesidium call it Opus 3 and they have a slogan to sell it. The acronym stands for Open Participation, Unbiased Selection, and the slogan is "staff screening with no offence". It aims to take some of the grime from under the fingernails of job-vetting by fully involving the subject in the process. The subject must agree to it as part of taking the job offer. It goes like this:

Step 1: Having done an analysis on the risk involved in the job, there is a preliminary interview and subjects fill in a 29-question form about themselves.

Step 2: They are expected to provide proof of qualifications, their birth certificate and their passport containing details of foreign travel. They must provide two years' worth of bank statements for all accounts, as investigators look for out-of-the-ordinary millions wafting in and out. Forensic tests will be done on any suspected forged documents. Subjects must apply to a police station to release any details of criminal convictions (at a cost of pounds 10).

Step 3: Subjects must give five referees - people known personally or professionally - and two or three are selected and checked up on and then interviewed.

Step 4: A detailed check of public records.

Step 5: The company's sleuths visit the candidate in his or her own home for a "lifestyle evaluation". The subject has the opportunity to explain any inconsistencies or foibles that have been uncovered during the investigation.

Step 6: The finished report is presented to the client, with the risk attached to hiring the subject. All computer records are deleted and only a hard copy of the final report is kept.