Companies, Government Agencies Checking Employee Credentials

“First, let’s review the documents of new recruits who belong to the overseas marketing team.”

Yesterday, a personnel manager identified as Park (36) of a trade company in Teheran-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, began to check new employees’ application documents and English score certificates one by one with staff.

Park said, “With the recent issue of the forgery and alteration of various certificates issued online emerging, we have decided to re-check certificates that are required to be submitted in applying for companies,” adding, “Given that applicants’ academic records and English scores exert a significant influence in entering companies or posting new employees, we decided to take these steps in order to dispel any suspicions.”

With the possibility of forging various e-documents arising, each company is busy reviewing new employees’ documents.

It is Difficult to Check These Documents-

A prestigious advertisement agency has decided to re-check its employees’ certificates. An official of this company expressed his distress, however, saying, “Taking into consideration that doing such things might lead to invading their private lives as well as if we ask universities to check over whether their transcripts are true, it might lead to making public the state of employment in each university that companies are reluctant to disclose, we are not determined to put our plan into practice.”

He said, “We go to universities to obtain certificates issued from automatic-issuing machines, and then they are checked against the documents we received.”

Flooded with Inquiries-

Issuing institutions say that they are having difficulty dealing with their own tasks because companies and government agencies are trying to check the veracity of documents.

An official of the service center for students at a S University in Seoul said, “We are swamped with inquiry calls by not only firms but also graduate schools and research institutes to check the veracity of the certificates they received,” adding, “There are some absurd cases, including some people asking us to transmit all the certificates they want to check by fax.”

An official of a K University said, “We are reviewing measures in which we will post special employees in charge of such tasks in preparation for inquiries that are expected to go up.”

Issuing-Agencies Also Affected-

A civil documents agency said, “It is inevitable to increase fees given that obtaining various documents issued from each institute is more expensive by 30 to 40 percent than using those issued online,” adding, “If we increase service charges, it will be evident for less people to use our service.”

A civil document agency’s manager, identified as Kim, said, “When the period where more people move to other houses or the period where students graduate from their universities and enter firms comes, more people will use our service,” adding, “We are concerned about the situation in which more people will distrust e-documents.”