MediaWise: Richard Li, Stanford Dropout
By Joel McCormick, AsiaWise
26 Mar 2001 12:30 (GMT +08:00)
Last week, the world learned that Pacific Century CyberWorks executive chairman Richard Li doesn't really have a computer engineering degree from Stanford after all. For this we must thank not Richard Li -- who left his PR machine to perpetuate the myth for years -- but a digger at the International Herald Tribune.
Fluffed up resumes are getting to be quite a problem. Before James Baughman suddenly died of a heart attack at 47 last September, everyone thought the head of recruiting at Lucent Technologies was a Stanford PhD. Although that lie was uncovered elsewhere long before -- along with the fact Baughman did time for embezzling from a school board (on his way to becoming the youngest school superintendent in California history) -- he still managed to climb up Lucent's ladder.
The remarkable part of the story is that Lucent's own HR due diligence process didn't uncover these things, according to a New York Times account, and thus preclude his hiring.
It turned out Baughman was absorbed through a Lucent acquisition, thus bypassing the normal screening. Mergers and acquisitions are a big source of employee trouble these days, expressly because so many people end up working for large companies without going through the same rigorous hiring clearances as everyone else.
It's conceivable if not probable that Richard Li with his non-existent Stanford degree would have been stopped at the gate by Cable & Wireless HKT's HR machinery had he applied for a job at the company rather than masterminding its takeover.
Since the Baughman case surfaced, Lucent has decided it will run checks on everyone who didn't join its workforce the Lucent way. In doing that, it mimics a growing number of large companies. The other big change over the last 10 years, Li and others should know, is the tendency of companies today to be as skeptical of insiders as outsiders when it comes to background checks. Fibbers whose lies went undetected when they were first hired should assume their stories will undergo more rigorous scrutiny each time they try to move up the ladder. This is typically where they get found out.
Judging by the growing media coverage, fake degrees have been popping up in Asia like mushrooms after a spring rain. Punch "fake degrees" into the Dow Jones search engine and 50 of the 70 most recent stories that pop up are from Asia. Pakistan Press International, for example, reported last month how education secretary Nazar Mehar in Sindh province had promised to root out employees who secured jobs in his department using fake degrees. And how, in Islamabad, health ministry officials were cautioning the public to be on their guard for fake doctors and dentists.
Just this month, according to AP, Vietnam said it was up stepping up efforts, begun back in 1999, to crack down on fraudulent degree holders and had nabbed 3,200 fakers combing through the records of a half million state employees and students.
Last November, the Times of India reported that Modi Nagar police had busted a gang of diploma counterfeiters, netting a cache of imitation certificates of many top universities, as well as official letterheads and stamps. India Today had earlier reported the arrest of a university vice chancellor alleged to have run a racket involving the appointment of unqualified people to university posts. "The word 'vice' in the vice-chancellor designation is acquiring a different meaning," groaned Delhi University Teachers' Association prez S.S. Rathi.
Last May, The Age in Melbourne quoted one HR consultancy as saying a full quarter of all resumes in Australia stretch the truth somewhere. To drive the point home, Personnel Risk Management officials identified several web sites where surfers could obtain fake degrees and identities. PRM argues that most fraud -- an annual A$16 billion problem down under, according to accountants KPMG -- can be eliminated by proper screening before hiring.
With China graduating about 800,000 students annually, fakers should be having a field day -- the government's central registry of graduates had only listed the names of about 200,000 when Singapore's Straits Times looked in last year.
Besides the registry, there is something called the China Degree and Graduate Education Development Center where people, usually foreign missions and corporations, can check the bona fides of degree holders and separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. In a stunning admission, a center official told the Straits Times that one out of every 10 requests for degree verification couldn't be verified.
Perhaps that 10% did their studies in Indonesia. The Jakarta Post two years ago was quoting 10 million rupiah -- slightly more than $1,400 at the then prevailing exchange rates -- for a fake degree from the University of Indonesia.
According to Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers says that U.S colleges are unable to verify enrollment or graduation claims made by nearly half a million people each year.
Richard Li's disclosure of his unfulfilled Stanford days at least solves one of those half million riddles. But it was fascinating watching his PR people last week. Despite having circulated nonsense about his Stanford graduation in press releases for years -- they took pains to stress how the company had never once spoken in riddles or embellished anything in official filings.
So the lesson here is, the next time you go to PCCW to get the unvarnished facts, make damn sure securities officials are standing in the room.
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