A man selected for an administrative assistant position through the Public Service Commission was turned over to the police after officials discovered he had not completed any of the stages of his own selection exam.
He arrived at the commission’s secretariat on Tuesday, September 1, to begin the job. Staff initiated the routine pre-employment identity check, comparing his face to the photograph on his admission card and to security camera footage recorded on the day of his oral exam. The faces did not match.
The discrepancy was reported to Deputy Director Shobhon Samaddar, who forwarded it to Undersecretary Wasimul Bari. After further verification and questioning, the candidate admitted that other people had taken both the written exam and the interview for him. He was taken to the Sher-e-Bangla Nagar police station, and a complaint was filed. The commission announced the case in a press release.
Someone else sat a face-to-face interview
The written exam is the part many consider vulnerable. Hundreds of candidates in an auditorium, a supervisor with a stack of admission cards, a postage-sized photograph.
The oral interview is different. An examining board sits across from a person. They question, evaluate, and grade them. And, according to the commission itself, that board went through the entire process with a man who wasn’t the applicant and passed him.
The last checkpoint held
What prevented it wasn’t the exam room, but the onboarding desk.
The committee records the oral interviews with closed-circuit television cameras and compares the recordings with the person who comes forward to accept the position. That’s the last check before a fraudulent appointment becomes a paid job, and in this case, it was the only one that worked.
This leads to an uncomfortable interpretation. The check worked exactly as intended. This also means that all the previous checks—the written exam room, the oral interview, and the document verification—allowed the same person access.
This is not the first time this year
In June, four people were arrested during the oral examination for Administrative Assistant positions at a regional tax office in Kushtia. The examining committee members found their behavior suspicious, and a review of their documentation revealed that the photographs on their admission cards had been forged. They admitted to impersonating the actual applicants.
Same position, same crime, same stage of the process, three months apart.
The Administrative Assistant position corresponds to Grade 20. It receives an enormous volume of applications, often hundreds of thousands, and until a candidate reaches the examining committee, identity verification is relatively lax. This combination is what these two cases have in common.
What has not been answered
The commission’s report focuses solely on the arrests. It doesn’t specify who the straw men were, whether they are being sought, or whether other appointments from the same selection process are being reviewed.
This last question is crucial. If security camera footage captured a candidate on the day of their appointment, the same recordings exist for everyone else who participated in the same meeting.
Where this stands
Nothing has been established in court. A criminal complaint is the beginning of a case, not its conclusion, and the admission described by the commission occurred during questioning by officials, not before a judge. The allegations remain unproven.
For this reason, Rising Barta has not revealed the candidate’s name, even though the commission published his name and photograph, and other media outlets have also disseminated them. Two sources provide different identification numbers for him, further justifying the withholding of information that would allow for his identification.
Rising Barta will report on the outcome of the police investigation and any review of the selection process by the commission once they are announced.
