Sijil Palsu, Perkembangan menakutkan di Malaysia
Fake degrees: A worrying trend in Malaysia
Many
found holding fake qualifications, including doctors
Monday,
6 May 2019
PETALING JAYA: An estimated one in 20 potential hires in Malaysia
has fake qualifications while one in 10 has credentials from unaccredited
institutions, a corporate fraud investigation agency found.
This comes as a foreign documentary showcases a list
of possibly over 80 Malaysians with local addresses having allegedly purchased
fake degrees via Axact, a Pakistani firm known for degree mills.
Datuk Seri Akhbar Satar, who is the managing director
of Akhbar & Associates, an agency that conducts background checks on
potential hires for companies, said 5% to 7% of the people that they investigated
had fake degrees while 10% to 15% had degrees from unaccredited universities.
“Many of these people with fake degrees are applying
for senior management jobs and it happens in multiple industries, including
banks, clinics and hospitals,” said Akhbar, who is also Certified Fraud
Examiners Association (Malaysia Chapter) president and former president of
Transparency International Malaysia.
He said his agency had also found doctors with fake
qualifications.
Akhbar was responding to an Al-Jazeera documentary
into fake degree mills in Pakistan that revealed a list of those who allegedly
bought fake qualifications, including PhDs and Masters, from Axact.
Although the names of the “students” on the list were
censored, it showed that among them were possibly over 80 Malaysians with local
addresses.
The list was seized by Pakistani authorities when they
raided Axact’s premises.
Axact founder Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh was later arrested
and charged with fraud.
In the 101 East documentary, thousands of these fake
degree holders were found to be working as doctors, nurses, teachers and
engineers in South-East Asia, including Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
“Thousands of people are employed in safety critical
jobs while holding bogus qualifications,” it reported.
The 25-minute documentary exposes sales tactics used
by fictitious online universities promising thousands of paying students a
degree qualification without having to attend any class or take any
examination.
Over 370 fake online universities, which claim to be
based in the United States, are linked to Pakistani software company Axact,
among which are Brooklyn Park University, Nixon University and Newford
University.
Among those found to have purchased a bogus PhD was
Myanmar’s former planning and finance minister Kyaw Win, who admitted to buying
his qualification from the fictitious online university Brooklyn Park.
Akhbar said Malaysia was “one of the worst” when it
came to people buying fake degrees because the background-checking practice
here was poor.
Most companies, he said, did not lodge a police report
or take legal action against their employees with fake degrees and only
resorted to internal action.
“In the end, these fake degree holders have no record
of their fraud and will get a job in another company. They will continue to
work in the system,” said Akhbar, adding that companies had a responsibility to
make a police report.
Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) chief executive
officer Datuk Dr Rahmah Mohamed said no organisation should condone the
practice of fake qualifications.
She said it was important for the public, especially
employers, to ensure that the qualifications of their employees were accredited
by the accreditation agencies.
“The Malaysian government has put the quality of higher
education a priority as a key factor in producing competitive human resources
and talent to support national advancement,” she said, adding that it had set
up accreditation systems through MQA and other professional and regulatory
bodies.
Employers, she added, could check online the lists of
accredited programmes offered by Malaysian higher education institutions
through the Malaysian Qualifications Register (MQR) as well as other
professional and regulatory bodies.
In Malaysia, there was much uproar when news broke in
February that several politicians, including Deputy Foreign Minister Datuk
Marzuki Yahya and former Johor mentri besar Osman Sapian, had misrepresented
their qualifications.
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