If you look closely at how individual authorities monitor their respective sectors deal the issue of forged certificates, you would probably be skeptical if any of them managed to develop a solution to tackle the problem, especially if you read the Ministry of Education's directive that was addressed to its employees. The ministry's directive ordered managers to check the qualifications of their employees and stop them from using the Arabic letter ‘Dal' (denoting Dr.) as a prefix to their names until their certificates were duly verified and attested. It is a similar scenario if you read the statement of Hamad Al-Shaqawi, president of the Saudi Council of Engineers, in which he said the council discovered 850 bogus certificates and that there were more than 15,000 foreigners with bogus degrees in the Kingdom. If you analyze the statistical figures released by the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties, you can see that it had found 542 cases involving bogus certificates in 2009 while other statistical reports indicated the number of forgery cases discovered during the period between April 2011 and March 2012 were 1,047 in the private sector and 489 cases in the government sector. However, your skepticism would turn into certainty when you notice that no one took this problem seriously and tried at least to reduce the number of forgery cases, as they continue to rise each year. Your conviction would lead you to the assumption that the punitive measures against such violations are potentially very weak. Hence, companies and hospitals as well as engineers and doctors are paying no heed to such penal actions, and subsequently, forged certificate figures are on the rise year after year. Imagine, dear reader; if the penalty for the holder of a bogus medical or engineering certificate came under the same provision of “attempted murder” and lead to fines to the tune of millions of riyals against violating companies and hospitals. If we applied such punitive measures surely we can bring down these figures by next year. The forger would think a thousand times about committing such crimes before boarding the plane if he is a foreigner. In the case of a citizen, he will also think many times before employing such a fraudster. This is because the punishment is both terrifying and, at the same time, a fair one as well. If one practices as a doctor or an architectural engineer without obtaining a proper certificate, he is then proceeding to commit the crime of murder through a possible misdiagnosis or by building a house that may fall down on the heads of its inhabitants. As for those working in the educational field with a bogus certificate, they are committing the crime of killing a generation.
