EX-TECH PROFESSOR ADMITS LYING OVER EMPLOYMENT

A former Georgia Tech professor will serve five years’ probation after he pleaded guilty to lying about being under contract with both the Atlanta university and the University of Minnesota simultaneously.

Authorities say Francois Sainfort was sentenced Monday in Fulton County. Sainfort and his wife, Julie Jacko, were charged a year ago with conspiracy to defraud, theft by taking and making false statements.

Authorities said the duo was double-billing the universities, and that Sainfort sent an email to Georgia Tech officials in February 2008 lying about whether he and Jacko had signed a contract with Minnesota, where they are currently employed.  The charges against Jacko were dismissed. Sainfort paid $43,578 in restitution.

Their attorney, Martin Goldberg, did not return a call for comment. Georgia Tech officials declined comment.

To read more, visit: http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/ex-tech-professor-admits-1429442.html

SAFER ONLINE DATING

Online dating is getting a little bit safer now that three major sites, Match.com, eHarmony and Spark Networks (the operator of JDate and Christian Mingle) have agreed to join forces with California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris to protect members by running background checks on prospective subscribers.

While some of the dating sites have already implemented screening of prospective members, this announcement is the first joint effort with law enforcement and Attorney General Harris is encouraging other dating sites to implement similar policies.

The participating sites will now check subscribers against national sex offender registries; anyone who is a registered sex offender will be barred from the online dating services.  The sites will also be screening for violence and identity theft as well as checking the accuracy on client applications.  Any criminal information gathered from the dating sites will be provided to the Attorney General’s office.

The sites will also increase their online safety tools with “rapid abuse reporting systems,” which will give members access to a website, email address and/or phone number to report suspected criminal activity.  Further implementations include online dating safety education, guidance for fraud prevention and instruction on how to meet people safely offline.

The increased use of online dating sites has also brought an increase in financial scams and even physical abuse.  A Match.com client sued last year, saying she was raped on a date with a repeat sex offender she had met through the site.  The alleged attacker had at least six prior sex offense convictions.

In 2011, 40 million Americans used an online dating service and more than $1 billion was spent on online dating website memberships.  Of couples married in the last three years, one in six met through an online dating service and one in five people have dated someone they met through an online dating site.

“Consumers should be able to use websites without the fear of being scammed or targeted,” said Attorney General Harris.  ”It is a priority for this office to ensure consumers are protected online, and companies who are creating in the Internet space have a continued opportunity to innovate and thrive.”

While these measures are promising, not every would-be sex offender can be screened out. Common sense is paramount, and safe online dating tips include using the online dating services email system, meeting in public places and letting friends know vital information about the person you are meeting.

 

WILL BOY SCOUTS’ FILES EXPOSE “CULTURE OF HIDDEN SEX ABUSE?”

A judge in Santa Barbara, CA has ordered the Boy Scouts of America to hand over the last 20 years’ worth of confidential files, detailing allegations of sexual abuse by Scout leaders around the nation.

Historically, Scout officials have resisted releasing the estimated 5,000 files, which have been kept since the 1920’s and are known as “ineligible volunteer files.”  The Scouts haven’t discussed the file contents either, citing the privacy rights of victims and the fact that many files are based on unproven allegations. Scout officials further deny that the files have been used to conceal sexual abuse.

According to Deron Smith, public relations director for Boy Scouts of America “These files exist solely to keep out individuals whose actions are inconsistent with the standards of Scouting, and Scouts are safer because of them.”

But in a negligence lawsuit brought against the Scouts by the family of a California boy molested by his Boy Scout troop leader in 2007,  the boy’s lawyers contend these files will expose the Scouts’ “culture of hidden sexual abuse” and its failure to warn about pedophiles in the ranks of one of the nation’s oldest youth organizations.  ”They have created these ticking time bombs who are walking through society, and nobody knows their identities except the Scouts,” said Timothy Hale, one of the lawyers for the Santa Barbara County boy.

The lawsuit contends that the Boy Scouts knew, or should have known that Al Stein, a volunteer troop leader who had a history of inappropriate behavior with children and had put the unnamed victim boy at risk. The suit further alleges that the Scouts asked the victim’s mother not to call the police following her son’s claim of abuse, stating that the Scouts conduct their own “internal investigation.” Lawyers for the family say this is evidence of the Scout’s efforts to conceal widespread sexual abuse.

In 2008, Stein was charged with committing a lewd act upon a child and two child pornography charges for photographs he took of a boy. In 2009, Stein pleaded no contest and was put on probation. Authorities later found pictures of nude children on Stein’s cell phone and he was sentenced to two years in prison, but was paroled early.  According to Stein’s attorney, Stein is currently living in a motel with other sex offenders.

The trial is set for April in Santa Barbara County.

FACEBOOK PROFILE AS AN INDICATOR OF JOB SUCCESS?

The idea that Facebook and other social media sites can be used as a tool when hiring a new employee is not so surprising.

What is surprising are the results of a recent study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, where findings concluded a direct correlation between job success and the information a user publishes on their Facebook.

In the experiment, three “raters” (comprised of one university professor and two students) were provided the Facebook profiles of 56 college students with jobs.

“In five or 10 minutes, our raters could look at the tone of a subject’s wall post, note the number of friends they have, peruse their photos to see how social they were and assess their tastes in books and music. It’s a very rich source of information,” said Don Kluemper, the lead researcher and a professor of management at Northern Illinois University.

Raters generally gave favorable evaluations to students who had more friends, traveled, and showed a wide variety of hobbies and interests. Photographs of “partying” didn’t necessarily weigh in negatively, in fact raters perceived the student as extroverted and friendly.

The raters then answered a series of personality-related questions, such as “Is this person dependable?” and “How emotionally stable is this person?”

Six months later, the researchers matched these ratings with employee evaluations provided by each of the students’ supervisors. What they found was a strong correlation between job performance and the Facebook scores for traits such as conscientiousness, agreeability and intellectual curiosity.

Although the study did not examine the legality of using social media sites in the hiring process, these findings do raise questions about Facebook potentially being used as a reliable job-screening tool. The researchers caution that before recruiters use Facebook or other social media sites to assess a potential candidate, there are ethical and legal issues to consider, and employers could be opening themselves up to discrimination lawsuits.

The findings of this study are timely; applicants at police departments in North Carolina and Oklahoma, were asked to provide their Facebook passwords last year, according to a report in Human Resources Journal.

 

HUNDREDS OF PRISONERS REGISTER AS TAX PREPARERS

Hundreds of prison inmates have found new careers behind bars — by registering with the IRS as income tax preparers.

A total of 331 inmates were serving prison terms when they got active or provisional tax preparer tax identification numbers from the IRS, according to an audit issued by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

Forty-three of those applicants were serving life sentences at the time. Yet none of the lifers disclosed their felony convictions on the IRS application, the audit found.

In all, 962 applicants who had an incarceration date within the last 10 years got active or provisional tax preparer identification numbers. More than three in four didn’t disclose their convictions.

The inmates and ex-cons were among thousands of applicants who got the identification numbers from the IRS from September 2010 through July 2011 as the agency began phasing in a 2009 congressional mandate that requires many preparers to file tax returns electronically.

The IRS officials told auditors it would suspend tax preparer identification numbers already issued to prisoners and deny any future applications from inmates.

“Our report shows that the problem of misuse of the tax system by prison inmates continues,” said J. Russell George, who heads the inspector general’s office. “Based on our report, the IRS is working on solutions for suspending preparer identification numbers obtained by prisoners and preventing future applicants who are prisoners from receiving a preparer ID number. They must persevere in these efforts … especially given the prison inmate population’s determination to misuse the system.”

Prisoner registration as tax preparers is a new twist in a long history of tax scams involving inmates.

For instance, USA Today reported in February that prisoners in three states — Florida, Georgia and California — led the nation’s inmate population by using false or fraudulent tax returns to scam nearly $19 million in IRS refunds during 2009.

That total was part of $39.1 million in unmerited federal tax returns the IRS issued to jail and prison inmates nationwide, according to an IRS report to Congress in January.

To read more, click http://www.suntimes.com/news/9726326-418/hundreds-of-prisoners-register-as-tax-preparers.html

THE FIRST SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

Have you ever wondered who the first person was to ever possess a Social Security Number?  You’re not alone and that is why we found him!

John David Sweeney, Jr, according to the Social Security Administration, was issued the first official Social Security Number (SSN) on December 1, 1936.

Batches of SSN records containing 1,000 cards each were prepared and processed as Master SSN Files. When the first batch was ready, Joe Fay, the head of the Division of Accounting Operations in the Candler Building, picked the top record off the batch and declared it the first official SSN.  This record happened to belong to Mr. Sweeney.

Sweeney was 23 years old and the son of a wealthy factory owner from New Rochelle, New York.  To learn the family business, Mr. Sweeney started working as a shipping clerk for his father.  It was at that time he filled out his application for a social security card so that his earnings could be recorded.

In 1974 John Sweeney, Jr died of a heart attack without receiving any benefits from the Social Security Program.  However, his widow  received benefits based on his work until her death in 1982.

To read more, visit http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/firstcard.html

TEMP JOBS EXPECTED TO BE ON THE UPSWING IN 2012

In the fall of 2011, the US economy had corporations acting like a significant other who isn’t ready to commit. Instead of marrying themselves to permanent employees, companies are hedging their economic bets by creating temporary jobs and hiring more project-based workers.

On a year-over-year basis, 7.8 percent more temporary workers were employed in September 2011 compared with the same month last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That trend has temporary employment agencies predicting that hiring for temp jobs and seasonal jobs will increase in late 2011 and into 2012.

Hottest Cities for Temp Jobs

Temporary jobs are particularly plentiful in the Southwest — especially Texas — as well as the Northeast, says Jorge Perez, senior vice president of Manpower North America in Milwaukee.

“Texas is a good market and the Northeast has been quite strong,” he says. “The region that is the weakest as of now is the Midwest because you have more dependency there on the industrial sector. The Southwest is good and the West Coast is somewhere between.”

Demand for temps also varies by industry, says Jodi Chavez, West Coast senior vice president for Ajilon Professional Staffing in Melville, New York. Her temp agency is seeing a boost in light industrial and professional services temp jobs in Texas and increased demand for temp accounting and finance professionals in San Francisco; Washington, DC; Chicago and New York City.

Detroit has been a tough job market in recent years, but Randstad USA, a division of Randstad Holding NV, one of the world’s largest temp employment agencies, is seeing temp jobs come back in that market, too, says Joanie Ruge, the company’s chief employment analyst.

Temporary agencies are also finding demand for their services is high in areas where unemployment is low, like Nebraska, New Hampshire and Texas. In California and in the Texas cities of Dallas, Austin and Houston, companies are seeking healthcare, IT, engineering and manufacturing temps, Ruge says.

“There are opportunities out there,” she says. “Of course, they vary depending on where you are and your skill set.”

Temp Jobs Pay Increase

With demand building, particularly for skilled employees, pay increases can’t be far behind, temp agency officials say. “What we’re hearing from companies is that they’re lacking a little confidence in their hiring,” Chavez says. “But if an economic plan emerges from Washington, DC, for a stimulus or tax incentives, then we’ll see a competitive job market where companies will have to raise [temp] wages and get creative in recruiting.”

Hottest Temp Skills

A mismatch between the skills needed by companies and the skills possessed by job seekers is frustrating temp employment agencies. “The talent mismatch is very evident,” says Perez. Despite the high unemployment rate, Perez reports having a hard time nationally finding computer numeric machinists, truck drivers, healthcare technicians, IT professionals, engineers and sales professionals.

“It sounds crazy with the unemployment rates we have, but we don’t have enough talent to go around,” he says.

Still mired in the recession, companies are hiring more middle-management and even executive-level workers for temporary jobs, especially project roles, Ruge adds. “We’re seeing those temporary jobs in accounting, finance, IT, engineering and healthcare.”

Administrative temps will find there’s less competition for jobs in 2012 because more than 100,000 admin workers found employment between September 2010 and September 2011. Executive assistants can earn $18 to $30 an hour; the highest rates go to temps in high-cost markets who have experience supporting CEOs and other company leaders, Chavez says.

Multilingual temps are also in demand, Chavez says. Global corporations headquartered in China, Japan and Latin America have temp jobs in their US offices for bilingual workers who speak English plus Chinese, Japanese or Spanish.

Holiday Hiring

Seasonal jobs, which follow trends in seasonal sales, are likely to hold steady this year. The National Retail Federation predicts retailers will hire between 480,000 and 500,000 seasonal workers this holiday season, about the same as last year.

While most retailers offer seasonal jobs in anticipation of an uptick in traffic and sales during November and December, retailers have also been hiring throughout the last year: Since August 2010, the retail industry has added nearly 100,000 jobs.

To read more, click http://career-advice.monster.com/job-search/company-industry-research/temporary-jobs-outlook-2012/article.aspx

MATCH.COM TO START BACKGROUND CHECKS ON MEMBERS

We’re hoping this makes the process of meeting your true love online just a little bit easier, though you never can be too careful.
After an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles went on a couple of dates with a man she met on the popular dating site Match.com, she said the initially-charming man sexually assaulted her. Afterwards, she did some online sleuthing and discovered that her date had a history of sexual battery. The woman has since filed a lawsuit against the dating site, stipulating that the company should check members’ names against public sex offender registries in order to increase safety.

And while the site’s attorney originally said that such a task was problematic, the site now seems to have changed its tune; Match.com has announced that they plan on screening members to see if they have a history of sexual assault.

Despite the increased safety measures, which should go into effect in the next few months, a rep for the site still warned that while “these checks may help in certain instances, they remain highly flawed, and it is critical that this effort does not provide a false sense of security to our members.” (via Consumerist)

To read more, visit http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/18/after-sexual-assault-controversy-match-com-to-start-background-checks-on-members/#ixzz1kKU6228z

LYING ON YOUR RESUME: WHAT ARE THE CAREER CONSEQUENCES?

When a woman we’ll call Mary was offered a high-level student-services position at a prestigious college, she was thrilled to accept. But two years later, Mary was fired despite strong performance reviews and a reputation as a rising star at the college. The reason? She lied on her resume — and got caught.

An HR initiative requiring employees to furnish college transcripts revealed Mary lied about having a master’s degree. It wasn’t lack of a degree that cost Mary her job; it was her dishonesty. Unemployed and with a blown reference to boot, Mary demonstrates what can happen when you lie on your resume.

Companies are growing increasingly savvy in ferreting out resume cheaters through more comprehensive background checks conducted both pre- and posthire. Why the latter? Subpar job performance can prompt a follow-up investigation into an employee’s past. If dishonesty is discovered, it is often grounds for termination and possibly legal action.

Yet Mary is hardly alone in falsifying information on a resume. Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics and a renowned economics professor at the University of Chicago, cites research suggesting that more than 50 percent of people lie on their resumes.

Given such repercussions as Mary’s fate, you might wonder why anyone would attempt to get away with lying on a resume in the first place. Levitt refers to a W.C. Fields quote in his explanation: “Anything worth winning is worth cheating for.”

Power — and Misery — Foster Temptation

In a kind of twist on the Peter Principle, which suggests that within corporate hierarchies, employees tend to be promoted until they reach their ultimate levels of incompetence, Levitt postulates that “the higher up in the organization a person rises, the more likely it is that he or she will cheat.”

His observation is certainly borne out by news headlines about executives resigning in the face of resume dishonesty. Common resume lies include falsifying academic credentials, padding dates to mask employment gaps, exaggerating job titles, embellishing job responsibilities and achievements, claiming sole responsibility for team efforts and even making up fictitious employers.

Levitt also found a correlation between mood and the temptation to cheat. The desperation felt when weeks of unemployment stretch into months, or the low morale experienced by someone employed but truly miserable in a job, appear to increase the incentive to lie.

The Big Consequences of Little Lies

“The best lies will be those that mirror reality,” Levitt says. “My hunch is that the reputed 50 percent of resume cheaters are mostly making little cheats here and there, for instance, to cover up times when they were out of the labor force for six months.”

Perhaps viewing these mistruths as harmless white lies or marketing spin, people who lie on a resume may end up doing more damage — to themselves and others — than they realize.

“When someone else cheats, it hurts the honest people,” Levitt says. Honest job seekers can be edged out of competition by individuals who give themselves an unfair advantage by fabricating or exaggerating credentials.

And what about the damage cheaters do to themselves? “Even if you are never caught, you will have to live in constant fear that someday you will be caught and punished and with the guilt of knowing what you did was wrong,” Levitt warns.

Honest Strategies for Getting Ahead

No matter what the reason or justification for lying, if your resume isn’t entirely truthful, know this: You don’t have to resort to lying to win a job. There are ethical resume strategies you can use to address issues like job-hopping, time off from the workforce, minimal work experience, lack of or incomplete college degrees, being fired and having a criminal record.

Levitt’s research findings and the stories of job seekers who got caught lying on their resumes are cautionary tales to anyone in the workforce: You jeopardize your future when you lie about your past.

To read more, visit http://career-advice.monster.com/resumes-cover-letters/resume-writing-tips/lying-on-your-resume/article.aspx

WOULD YOU HIRE YOUR HUSBAND?

NINE years ago, Laura Udall noticed that her young daughter Rachel suffered back pain from lugging her books back and forth to school. Ms. Udall, a former saleswoman at AT&T, decided to develop and market a backpack light enough for children to wear safely.

Sharon DiMinico leads a staff meeting at her company, Learning Express, based in Devens, Mass. Her husband, Lou, second from left, began working for the company in the late 1980s.

She founded her own company in 2003 and hired an industrial design firm. But after growing frustrated with a lack of progress, she turned to her husband, Nick. “He is brilliant at coming up with things, so he went into the garage and came up with our first prototype for a rolling book bag,” she said.

Today, Ms. Udall, 52, is chief executive of Züca Inc., a $2 million business in Campbell, Calif., that makes luggage. Her husband works for her as vice president for design and manufacturing.

“The buck really stops at me,” she said.

Ms. Udall’s situation may be somewhat unusual, but it is hardly unique.

At a time when high-profile women have suffered some setbacks on Wall Street and when women in general still struggle for pay parity, a group of entrepreneurs has proved that women are comfortable not only with running their own companies, but also with having their husbands work for them. In addition to finding ways to work together at home, the couples have created a separate balance of power in their business relationship. And though it may help that both partners do this to enrich a family enterprise, the woman may make a conscious effort to ensure that her mate is getting appropriate recognition.

While there is no data on the number of such companies, women were the majority owners of 7.7 million privately held firms at the end of 2006, up 42.3 percent from 10 years earlier, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research.

Generally, these couples say they have made the unconventional partnerships work by carefully delineating their respective roles and playing to each other’s strengths.

“That she would be chief executive was not an issue from the get-go,” Mr. Udall said. “When I first met her, I realized thatshe was one of the best salespeople I ever saw. I come from operations and marketing.” He sensed that what the business needed at the top was someone like his wife, “a charismatic person with a vision.”

SOME family advisers say that whatever the route, the odds are loaded against couples working well together.

“I think it is far more challenging,” said Laura Colin, who ran a family business with her husband, Larry, and was co-author with him of “Family Inc.,” a study of family businesses. “Men and women are made differently, and men generally — it is the testosterone thing — they are more compelled to dominate and get credit than women are,” she said. “I think that women are more team-oriented and will try to focus on the goal.”

Carol Kotewicz-Dencker, who has worked with her husband, Gregory Dencker, for 20 years, said those challenges could be overcome.

The couple met in 1988, when Mrs. Kotewicz-Dencker put an ad in The San Francisco Chronicle to recruit someone for Renoir Staffing Services, the temp agency she built that serves the real estate management business.

She had always wanted her own business. “I was an only child,” she recalled. “I was never raised with gender standards where boys do this and girls do that. It never occurred to me that women could not go out and do the same thing as men.”

But after three years as an entrepreneur, her annual revenues were a mere $200,000. Then, she said, “I found this one guy that was really above average.”

“He had been a pool and spa contractor so he spoke the language of the people he was hiring and could supervise them,” she recalled. “So I hired him.”

His arrival freed her to focus on the company’s growth and budgeting. Five years later, they married.

Today, Mr. Dencker is chief operating officer of the business, which is based in Oakland, Calif.; it had $7 million in revenue last year, he said. His wife, the chief executive, handles sales and promotion.

The men interviewed for this article seemed comfortable working at family companies controlled by their wives, perhaps because those who agree to that arrangement are not threatened by it. It was the wives who tended to be more sensitive about the potential pitfalls of having their husbands on the payroll.

 

To read more, visit http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/business/29hubby.html?ref=humanresources