Law graduate struck off the rolls for forging academic documents
A 30-year-old law graduate convicted of forging her academic certificates was on Tuesday (22 January) struck off the rolls by the Court of Three Judges.
Jaya Anil Kumar, who obtained a second lower honours degree from the National University of Singapore in 2011, had doctored her transcript – falsifying her grades for 21 out of 27 subjects.
Later, she also forged her law degree to make it seem as if she had a second upper honours degree. Jaya committed the crimes in the hopes of improving her chances of getting the jobs she wanted.
She was fined $10,000 on 18 January last year, having pleaded guilty to two charges of forgery of academic documents. Three other charges of the same and one count of attempted cheating were taken into consideration for her sentencing.
Grave and indefensible misconduct
After she was sentenced, the Law Society applied to the Court of Three Judges – which has the power to suspend or disbar lawyers – to strike her off the rolls.
While Jaya accepted that her misconduct was “grave and indefensible”, she asked for a long suspension period instead.
In their ruling on Tuesday, the court – comprising Judge of Appeal Tay Yong Kwang along with Justices Belinda Ang and Quentin Loh – reiterated an earlier judgement that “misconduct involving dishonesty will almost invariably warrant an order for striking off, where the dishonesty reveals a character defect rendering the errant solicitor unsuitable for the profession”.
However, the court said, “Everyone can repent and change. During the coming years, she will have to re-order her young life, re-focus on what is truly important, show the fruits of repentance and make a good case for the court to reinstate her as an advocate and solicitor sometime in the future.”
Doctored grades using Paint software
Jaya was called to the Bar in July 2012. In January 2013, she submitted a forged transcript of her university grades to the Legal Service Commission (LSC). She had doctored the transcript using the Paint software. She later attended a job interview but did not get hired.
More than three years later, Jaya repeated her crime. She submitted forged academic documents in May 2016 to legal resource service provider R&T Asia Resources.
In October 2016, she again submitted forged documents to the LSC.
This time, however, she forged both her degree and her transcript. She also pretended to have a second upper degree and doctored the results of 18 of her 27 subjects.
When a LSC secretariat staff contacted Jaya on 27 October 2016 to seek her consent to contact her university for her class ranking and percentile ranking, she declined.
Later the same day, the secretariat staff called her to ask about differences in the documents that she had submitted in 2013 and 2016. Jaya claimed that she had “mis-scanned” her documents, and that she might have mixed up her documents with that of her friend’s.
She e-mailed the LSC her genuine academic certificates later that evening. The LSC secretariat then made a police report on 3 November 2016.
Consistent trend of resorting to dishonesty
In their judgement, the Court of Three Judges said they “believe that any law student or young law graduate would know that forgery of documents is dishonesty and is a crime”.
“Ms Jaya Anil Kumar may have been inexperienced in January 2013 but we are looking at deliberate criminal acts here, not incompetence or error of judgement,” it added.
Noting that Jaya repeated and compounded her criminal conduct in 2016, the court said, “Her conduct shows a consistent trend of resorting to dishonest means to try to get what she wants as a career.”
Jaya was also ordered to pay $5,000 in costs to the Law Society.
More Singapore stories:
