Paul Viollis

Paul Viollis, the CEO of Risk Control Strategies, a Manhattan security screener for high-end clients, estimates conservatively that six of 10 resumes include “exaggerated or blatantly fraudulent” information. Other experts put the number between 10 and 20 percent.

“When some people start dreaming up resumes, they go into an almost novelistic mode,” says Michael Hershman, president of the risk-management firm the Fairfax Group, who cites studies that say fully 70 percent of resumes include a “major misstatement of fact.”

“I think there’s a lot of fraud, personally,” agrees Dorothea Gaulden, a former executive and author of the business ethics tome “Right Makes Might.” “Fraud is everywhere.”

A resume is a modest document – a dry, page-long summary of achievements that, while failing to capture what writer Richard Price calls “the wonder of me,” makes a serviceable introduction between job seeker and job giver.

And according to many experts, it’s more often than not a steaming pile of bovine feces filled with fraudulent academic credentials, mysterious omissions and wildly embellished job descriptions.