How serious is the problem of fake degrees?

There are more than half a million PRs in the island plus many that have taken up citizenship. Assuming half of the PRs are FTs, ie professionals that are the equivalent of our PMETs, it means that there are easily 250k of them working here.

There have been complaints or rumours that are many FTs are here on fake degrees, unqualified or half qualified. There is no official statistics so far on the size of this problem and no one really knows how serious is this problem. What are the implications to the country if 10% of the FT qualifications are fakes? This does not take into account that many came from educational institutions where the quality/standard of education is sub par or even suspect.

The most obvious and painful problem is for such FTs to be employed at the expense of Sinkies, taking away Sinkies’ jobs. And many fakes could be the superiors of the Sinkies. And they are going to be paid more, to determine the fate of Sinkies and the performance of the organizations. Depending on the industries they are in, any mistake can be very serious and costly or deadly, eg in construction of buildings, housing and infrastructure, in medicine, in engineering, in food technology and science.

While this problem is festering and only passed around as rumours, not many seem to have surfaced and the cheats taken to task. Maybe it is all simply rumours and there is not much truth in it as the statistics said so. Maybe the numbers of offenders are not disclosed thus no one is panicking. Not seen, not heard, thus no problems.

How can such problems be tackled both at the organization and industry level and at the national level? Are there organizations that can check and verify the qualifications of FTs to minimize the problem, to give justice to Sinkies and the professions that hired them and the end products or services they rendered?