A woman lied on her resume to land a $185,000-a-year job. Now shes going to jail
cnn.com
cnn.com
- The position is in a public office
- She impersonated former employers
- She hired her brother, who wasn't qualified for the position
- It is not the first job she got by lying on her résumé
It's especially egregious in this instances as most everyone lies, at least a little, on their resumes because often it's the only way to get pasted HR filter BS.
The precise words are different for each jurisdiction, for example, the South Australia criminal law (https://www.legislation.sa.gov.au/LZ/C/A/CRIMINAL%20LAW%20CO...) says "139—Deception; A person who deceives another and, by doing so— (a)dishonestly benefits him/herself or a third person; or (b) dishonestly causes a detriment to the person subjected to the deception or a third person, is guilty of an offence." - in essence, all lying to get a benefit or harm someone else; though they've chosen to label that particular crime 'deception' instead of 'fraud' as in many other places.
I wonder to what extent this is because burglary is committed by people who are poor and not well educated, whereas white collar crimes are committed by people who look just like your friends and colleagues.
Breaking into a home is a violent crime whereas white collar crime is nonviolent. You can often return property, you cannot make someone un-experience a burglary. Don't get me wrong (i.e. "I know that if I don't include this disclaimer someone will try to) white collar crime and corruption like this should certainly be prosecuted but there's a reason we generally don't punish it as severely as violent crime since we generally consider property less valuable than life and health.
Not much since poor people who are friends and colleagues to other poor people also make the same judgements.
Often quoted as "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".
The world needs people like you to speak up, to keep people like them in check. Do it anonymously if it suits you, but please do it.
I would guess the previous firings would be overlooked because the firing companies likely won't say anything on the record, and lying about team size is too small to be worth proving.
[A thing occurred. Here are the consequences.]
Usually, both the fact and the consequence are intentionally vague. The point seems to be to entice you want to read further.
As far as clickbait titles go, this is probably acceptable, but nonetheless it's getting pretty annoying. It's almost always a guarantee that the full details of the story will be more nuanced, and therefore will not carry the emotional weight of the headline, and the reader will be slightly disappointed.
It intentionally misrepresents the truth to get you to click. It is designed to create a false picture in your mind. That to me puts it right up there alongside the worst of the worst, particularly when coming from one of the biggest journalism organizations in the world.
[J-School survivor -- apologies if I'm a little touchy on the subject.]
(Maybe also sound.)
https://text.npr.org/ is pretty great as well - it is https.
Tangentially, though, I can't help but wonder about the staggering incompetency of the hiring committee. Not only did they seem to fail routine background confirmation, but how did this get past them:
> But the lies didn't end there. In earlier submissions, the court heard that Theriault used a photo of supermodel Kate Upton as her LinkedIn profile photo, according to CNN affiliate 7 News.
(Unless the defendant looks very similar to Upton)
The difference is Ms. Chang claimed to be on the front cover of time magazine.
Speaks volumes on the process to get into these positions. Might as well save the hundreds of thousands spent on college and pickup a copy of Adobe Photoshop to supercharge your resume to get those high paying gigs.
Begs the question, how many top positions are filled with completely unqualified individuals?
What is the data indicating this error is "rare" in the organization in question?
Right now they should be reviewing the background checks of everyone in the entire enterprise, as all of those people were subject also to the same obviously lax scrutiny. Starting with leadership and those in sensitive roles.
HR employees directly responsible for scrutiny in this particular case should be punished to include, at a minimum, placement on probation. (I agree with AcerbicZero though, I'd prefer they be fired.)
https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/08/smi...
Privilege isn't mysterious.
What would the implications be if a similar event occurred at, say, Google? Would it even be possible?
It seems that the onus for verification and in-depth analysis of a candidate falls onto the business. Is this just a case of poor decision making from the leadership group who hired the candidate? Is it uncommon to call more than one reference, or to simply Google a candidate and see what shows up? For such a high-level, government role... I'm sure there's more than just Google to reference as well?
However, CNN left those implications off the story because it is more entertaining to imagine she is in jail for using Kate Upton as her LinkedIn profile pic...
Should be easy considering this happened in Australia...
Color me surprised.
Not at all.
>the US currently has a President with no political experience
Which is a) known to all and b) considered by supporters to be a virtue, as is often the case for those in public life in many countries.
>who has also hired family members for prominent roles in the government.
Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner are Senior Advisors to the President, which are by definition positions whose main/only qualifications are "the President trusts them". Like her father, these two aren't paid a salary.[1]
Every US president since Washington, and every human leader since Ugg became chief caveman of the Grugg tribe, has had advisors that he trusts as much as (and, usually, more than) those with official titles below him. A common term for such for presidents is the Kitchen Cabinet.[2] Sometimes the Kitchen Cabinet gets titles to formalize their access to the advisee. In the US that's Senior Advisor to the President; in the UK it's Special Adviser to the Prime Minister;[3] in many countries it's Minister without Portfolio.
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/30/trump-white-house-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Cabinet
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_adviser_(UK)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_without_Portfolio
Kushner is the point man for the Middle East because Trump's attitude is that professional, full-time diplomats have consistently failed for 40 years, so why not try someone different? One of the prerequisites for such a role, arguably the most important one, is that both sides the envoy is mediating for know that said envoy has the president's trust.
As for his wife, again, there are no formal classes on "hosting meetings at the UN" at the Kennedy School or SIPA or Georgetown SFS, nor is there a "hosting meetings about women's rights at the UN" job description at State or anywhere in the executive branch (the existing US delegation to the UN's responsibilities are different). She either does a good job, or she doesn't and Trump sends someone else. Given that Ivanka has now performed the role over multiple years, apparently her father approves of how she's done.
Everything you said is utterly preposterous. Physycists have failed to come up with a GUT for quite some time now. Should Jared be in charge of that as well? Perhaps Ivanka could do a university tour to shake things up a bit.
What progress have either of these two made on any front exactly? How's the experiment going, objectively? Because what I see is an almost completely ineffective foreign policy strategy and a bunch of appointees whose only real qualifications are being born to wealthy parents.
Yes, for these sorts of positions, "because [president] thinks it's OK, it's OK" is the criteria Trump and all of his predecessors have used. If you don't believe me, feel free to try to find a formal, defined qualification for "informal presidential envoy to hopefully get some/any progress done in an area no progress has occurred in four decades", or "host of some meetings at the UN for women's rights and other such causes". I'll wait. The only difference is that in these cases the envoy happens to be related to the president as opposed to say, an old college roommate (Example: Kenneth O'Donnell, whom Kevin Costner portrayed in Thirteen Days), or law school buddy (twenty for Obama early in his administration [1]).
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2008/12/school-buds-20-harvar...
It's quite different from ...
>Everything you said is utterly preposterous. Physycists have failed to come up with a GUT for quite some time now. Should Jared be in charge of that as well?
Something like this, for which there is, in fact, a formal, defined criteria. The fact that you made such a ridiculous and obviously inapt comparison shows how desperate you are.
>The fact that you made such a ridiculous and obviously inapt comparison shows how desperate you are
"Inept" is, I believe, the word you were searching for.
Which is an inherently subjective argument, which is my point, as opposed to your saying that Kushner and Ivanka Trump are prima facie unqualified for their roles. Since you now know you can't prove this, you've shifted the goalposts.
>You can't argue that's it's a good idea, or that his decisions have produced any results
No, the onus is on you to prove that Kushner and Ivanka are inherently less qualified for what they are doing than, say, the examples I provided in my previous comment. Since being Robert Kennedy's college roommate and football teammate automatically means advising on national security matters in the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis, amirite?
I am not saying that O'Donnell was inherently unqualified for his role. On the contrary, for a position like his (identical to Kushner's and Ivanka's, by the way; just the title is different), being trusted by the person you advise is as important a criteria for such a role as any other. JFK trusted O'Donnell to work hard to give him good advice. Period. End of story.
Maybe Kushner will spend eight years over two Trump terms as Trump's Middle East envoy and no progress will be made in terms of Jewish-Arab peace. Such results would be ... about on par with all of his predecessors from seven different administrations over 40 years.
>"Inept" is, I believe, the word you were searching for.
Wrong again. "Inapt" is correct; your comparison of a position with formal, defined qualifications for versus positions without such is, as I said, an inapt one.
After 15 years really? That is annoying...
What happened was, while I had more than enough credits to graduate, I had an "incomplete" for a course in my last semester. I had dropped the course before the semester begam with the approval of my professor, but he marked me as incomplete instead of dropped, and apparently you can't get a diploma with an incomplete on your record(despite them letting me walk in graduation, and sending me a diploma a few weeks later).
Thankfully I had the whole email chain(because I bulk forwarded all of my college emails to my personal gmail address) at the time between my professor, the college administrator, and myself. If I didn't have that, theoretically I would have had to go back to college for a single class to finish out my degree.
Do you think the company would have let you continue to work while completing the course? Especially if it was like a foreign language or something?
Do you want someone reading your Facebook message because they can, or your gmail, or accessing your AWS resources? Granted these should all be locked and have strong audit trails from a system perspective, but there's always someone with "access" and you need to trust them.
Additionally, a four year degree might qualify your employment for grant subsidies for research while a lack there of might make it harder for the company to justify - I've worked in a few places now where my employment has been government subsidized since I've worked on novel research.
Basically, HR is stupid complicated and I'm sorry the experience was negative, but they were probably compelled to make sure they got that information to insulate the company from various legal exposures.
I think it'd be extremely dangerous for private corporations to run to the government for enforcement in the case that this sort of fraud occurs and that it'd be well if judges were highly skeptical of employers - otherwise, given the power imbalance of employers, they may be able to abuse such a system to subsidize their labour costs.
Private employers should also be given no opportunity to reclaim any costs arising from such a situation[1], as that too could be too easily abused.
1. And currently they are not, if you've ever wondered why nearly every employer prorates vacation time even for senior employees it's because if, on Jan 1, you took all your vacation days and then quit - there is no legal way for the company to try and reclaim the wages you were erroneously paid out - though if there was any pending funds coming to you (a bonus for instance) the company can usually deduct costs from those funds or just wholly withhold them, depending on the way that payment was described.
That's an "advantage" I'd never thought of to the standard US company boilerplate that you don't have an employment contract and (almost) nobody at the company has the authority to change that.
However for things like medical doctors, we need more care. Most people reading this could successfully be a medical doctor for a time: most people know enough to fake it and most problems are either obvious (or the right tests are obvious and from the results...) or go away on their own. You might not give the best treatment, but you can come up with something that is "good enough". However eventually (a few days) you will come across something the the average person doesn't know but a real doctor would.
As I didn't work closely with this person, I don't remember the details. What's clear is that HR will usually check up on employees after their start date, because it's assumed that no one's lying.
In another case, a company that I interviewed with ghosted me. (When I met the founder, he was late, had a bad attitude, ect.) They ghosted another friend of mine, and ended up hiring a rather unsavory person. When we were in school, their new hire was the campus drug dealer and cheated off of a friend of mine. They fired him a few months later when they found out he had a criminal record for cocaine.
So, yes, it's common for (Edit: American) HR to continue investigating new hires and then fire them shortly after due to issues with credentials or criminal records.
Yes, and there are a lot of government employees in many countries.
Why? She has been caught