If nothing else worth exporting, we are at least a country that produces laughter. Controls conducted by the Ministry of Administrative Reform reportedly revealed that a good number of civil servants had submitted fake or forged diplomas either during the recruitment or during the promotion process.
10% of the controlled files of public servants in municipalities and state-run private entities contained fake or forged high school diplomas.
The data shows that hundreds – if not thousands – of public servants with secondary education either forged the grade on their high school diploma or they forged the diploma itself.
In a sample of 5,000 employees’ files, controls :
7% that is 316 files were containing fake documents. Of these more than 70% , that is 266 files had fake high school diplomas.
Municipality police no exception…
Files of 156 municipality police workers contained fake documents.
The majority of this 7% had falsified the grade on the high school diploma.
Now the ministry plans to investigate the files of 35,000 public servants who had initially temporary contracts that were turned into permanent. Suspicion is high that the transformation of temporary contract to permanent occurred with the submission of fake or forged documents.
According to Greek media, the controls in the narrow and broader public sector will end up in 2,500 lay-offs.
It is not clear whether the forgers will be obliged to return the salaries they had received based on false documents and whether they will face charges on falsifying public documents like the high school diploma.
PS I don’t want to know for how many years the mass production of fake and forged documents helped the promotion of our esteemed civil servants and how many thousands benefited from this practice. Not to mention all these required documents asserting the knwoledge of foreign languages, PC use etc.
