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Impostor busted
Man with faked degrees kicked out of Customs
BY HG HELPS Editor-at-Large icu@jamaicaobserver.com
Monday, October 05, 2009
CUSTOMS employees called him Chris, or the 'white man'.
He was recruited under the new Danville Walker-led regime and seemed to be doing a fine job of protecting Jamaica's collection of revenue. The only problem was that he was not who he said he was in terms of his achievements in education. He was a fake.
Chris had started working as a senior customs officer earlier this year. He was based at the Norman Manley International Airport, mainly processing diplomats and other high-ranking officials.
Customs sources said that he was earmarked to take over the operations of the scanning section, where goods coming in are scanned to determine their legality. He was also supposed to have gone to Singapore for specialised training.
However, all of that evaporated in a flash when the man who had declared that he had a Bachelor's and two Master's degrees, turned out to be anything but an academic high achiever.
"He came in as a supervisor and told us that he went to this particular university which turned out to be fictitious when we checked it out," one employee of the Customs Department who worked with him told the Observer on condition of anonymity.
"What surprised us is that he claimed that he had two Master's degrees when he came here as a supervisor, although he let on that he last worked in a butcher shop cutting up meat," the employee said.
Commissioner of Customs Danville Walker confirmed in an interview with the Observer that the employee had not been truthful at the outset.
"I had this employee who I thought was an excellent worker. He was employed since I went there. I don't remember his name but it is not important. He was a young man who used to work in his family business so he came to me for a job. I met him at the interview and he got the job. He turned out to be a very good worker, hard-working, turned up to work always on time, always that person that a superior can count on to stay late, or come in if you can't find somebody to work.
"When the background checks were done six months later, it was found out that he had falsified his qualifications. One of the tragedies was if he did not have those qualifications that he falsified, he could still work at Customs. He would still have gotten the job.
"In his case, he got fired because he falsified the documents. There were a number of staff here who were begging for us to find a way to keep him, but I don't know that in this environment if we tried to set a new example, that we could have kept him and so he was let go," Walker said.
Observer checks revealed that the devastated man was undergoing counselling.
var addthis_pub="jamaicaobserver";
Man with faked degrees kicked out of Customs
BY HG HELPS Editor-at-Large icu@jamaicaobserver.com
Monday, October 05, 2009
CUSTOMS employees called him Chris, or the 'white man'.
He was recruited under the new Danville Walker-led regime and seemed to be doing a fine job of protecting Jamaica's collection of revenue. The only problem was that he was not who he said he was in terms of his achievements in education. He was a fake.
Chris had started working as a senior customs officer earlier this year. He was based at the Norman Manley International Airport, mainly processing diplomats and other high-ranking officials.
Customs sources said that he was earmarked to take over the operations of the scanning section, where goods coming in are scanned to determine their legality. He was also supposed to have gone to Singapore for specialised training.
However, all of that evaporated in a flash when the man who had declared that he had a Bachelor's and two Master's degrees, turned out to be anything but an academic high achiever.
"He came in as a supervisor and told us that he went to this particular university which turned out to be fictitious when we checked it out," one employee of the Customs Department who worked with him told the Observer on condition of anonymity.
"What surprised us is that he claimed that he had two Master's degrees when he came here as a supervisor, although he let on that he last worked in a butcher shop cutting up meat," the employee said.
Commissioner of Customs Danville Walker confirmed in an interview with the Observer that the employee had not been truthful at the outset.
"I had this employee who I thought was an excellent worker. He was employed since I went there. I don't remember his name but it is not important. He was a young man who used to work in his family business so he came to me for a job. I met him at the interview and he got the job. He turned out to be a very good worker, hard-working, turned up to work always on time, always that person that a superior can count on to stay late, or come in if you can't find somebody to work.
"When the background checks were done six months later, it was found out that he had falsified his qualifications. One of the tragedies was if he did not have those qualifications that he falsified, he could still work at Customs. He would still have gotten the job.
"In his case, he got fired because he falsified the documents. There were a number of staff here who were begging for us to find a way to keep him, but I don't know that in this environment if we tried to set a new example, that we could have kept him and so he was let go," Walker said.
Observer checks revealed that the devastated man was undergoing counselling.
var addthis_pub="jamaicaobserver";
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