On May 13, 2012, Yahoo! Inc. announced that Scott Thompson, the recently hired Chief Executive Officer who was revealed to have a discrepancy in his academic credentials included in online biographies and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, has left the company, and that the Board of Directors has named Ross Levinsohn as interim CEO to manage the day-to-day operations, effective immediately. The full text of the press release is available here: ‘Yahoo! Names Fred Amoroso Chairman and Appoints Ross Levinsohn Interim CEO’. (more…)

In a recent example of the need for businesses to conduct education verifications during background checks, the newly hired Chief Executive Officer of Yahoo!, Scott Thompson, was found to have discrepancies in his educational record after a letter from Third Point LLC, owners of close to 6 percent of Yahoo! shares, pointed out that while numerous biographies and securities filings claimed Thompson held a Bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer science, a “rudimentary Google search” revealed that his degree was in accounting only.  The letter is available here: Third Point letter to Yahoo! (UPDATE: Yahoo! Board of Directors Forms Special Committee to Review CEO Academic Credentials). (more…)

With some job candidates falsifying or inflating employment and educational accomplishments in order to find work in a competitive job market, Attorney Lester Rosen, CEO of background check firm Employment Screening Resources (ESR), will present the webinar “Employment and Education Verifications How to Tell What Is Real and What Is Not” on Thursday, March 15, 2012 from 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM PST. To register for the webinar, the third of four webinars in ‘A Guide to the Essentials of Safe Hiring eProgram Series’ with the Northern California Human Resources Association (NCHRA), visit: http://m360.nchra.org/event.aspx?eventID=38881&instance=0. (more…)

A recently released audit report of Dickinson State University (DSU) in North Dakota describes the school as a “diploma mill” for foreign students that awarded hundreds of unearned degrees to students mostly from China who did not complete their course work while also enrolling students who did not have qualifying grades. The audit, which examined foreign students who have taken part in a special program since 2003 allowing them to earn degrees both from DSU and a university in their home country, is at: http://www.ndus.edu/uploads/reports/96/dsu-internal-review-ddj-final-draft1-020912.pdf. (more…)

The Oregon House recently passed legislation, House Bill 4091 (HB 4091), aimed at removing redundancies, inconsistencies, and holes in Oregon’s systems of criminal background checks and the bill now moves to the Oregon Senate for consideration, according to a news release from the House Democratic Caucus. If passed, HB 4091 would make criminal background checks easier and less costly to track and maintain for volunteers and employees in human service and education positions and would also attempt to make background checks more usable across agencies. (more…)