what kind of background check did she have to pass?

We don't hire technicians without confirming degrees and talking to grad school supervisors. I suppose if she'd been scamming people for years she may have built up a reference database that outweighed an old grad school reference but any real security background check should have turned it up.

On edit: It looks like this is yet another of the company (army in this case) trying to use the get out of jail free card "It was the responsibility of the contracting company to check". This is the exact same bullshit that allows Walmart and thousands of other companies to hire and continue to underpay people that are not allowed to work in the country legally.

is concerned with a criminal record or signs that you might have sympathies toward an unfriendly nation or cause, not one's academic credentials.

When I went through induction into the Army, some of us had our background checks for a secret clearance held up for traffic violations. Anybody who didn't have their clearance was not allowed to go to Basic Training.

I wasn't going to mention it, but, yeah. PhD or not, that's surprising. Sometimes people in the medical fields have the worst health and hygiene issues.

TYY

Many possible reasons.

Of course, she didn't have a degree from Yale, the person who said it was confirmed lied, but apparently didn't get in trouble. Ah, bureaucracy at it's best!

Why is this coming out now?

Oh, wait... I know.

Her publications were presumably vetted by others with knowledge of statistics. The fact that she lacked the degrees means that he lacked the formal qualifications, not necessarily the requisite knowledge. Statisticians for the most part are responsible for designing experiments appropriate to the questions being asked, and for applying the appropriate tests to the resulting data. Each of these is an open process, available for examination by others who are qualified by knowledge and experience to do so.

While it is obviously wrong for someone to claim credentials she doesn't hold, I'm afraid that this may be used as an excuse to throw out certain PTSD findings by those who oppose paying veterans benefits for the disorder. The results should be re-examined for accuracy, not summarily thrown out.

n a statement, Army spokesman Lt. Col. Benjamin Garrett said that after learning of her misrepresentation, the Army reviewed Apodaca's published work, and "it was determined no flaws warranting retraction were identified." No problems were found with her unpublished work either, he said.

Too bad she had to play the bullshit game.

Sometimes I think "Human Resources" bureaucracies deliberately hire people with flaws in their credentials and rattling skeletons in their closets as a means of either controlling them or making it easier to dismiss them.

I have no trouble imagining this case is similar to some of the "see no evil" physicians various prison systems employ. Maybe this statistician was starting to report things that the Army didn't want reported.

It's quite possible, as you say, that she was actually fired for reasons other than the credential fraud. It's also possible she was hired at some point on condition she was simultaneously working on degrees.

All the facts are not in. We don't know if any agency is hiding behind the "mask of incompetence" we expect of our bureaucracies.

Seriously, how difficult is it to verify a masters and Ph.D?!

Apparently too much work for some bureaucrat.

I see these types of articles from time to time and it drives me nuts!