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The said reliance on the unscientific

May 18, 2013 Editorial

 

 

The Guyana Energy Agency is at the centre of an imbroglio over the use of the polygraph. Of some three dozen people employed within the section that deals with fuel marking, more than two dozen have been sent home. The agency simply refused either to extend or opted to terminate their contracts with the agency.
Indeed most of the contracts had a clause which stated that employment may be terminated by either side with minimum notice. What the contract did not specify was whether the employer would be responsible for honouring the contract to its duration. In short, if the contract is for a year and the agency opted to terminate it after four months, then that agency should pay the employee as though he or she had worked for a year.
But that being apart, and while the letters of termination do not offer a reason, those terminated say that the agency is pointing to the results of a polygraph. It would seem that the agency opted to have the bulk of its employees undergo the polygraph. Some volunteered to comply but there were those who quite rightly refused.
Polygraphy is not a stated clause in the local labour laws and therefore cannot be enforced. No employer can force an employee to be subjected to a polygraph test. However, mere refusal was enough to warrant the termination of the contract.
When the dust settled the Guyana Energy Agency merely said that it was maintaining its integrity; that it wanted people who were above board to monitor the fuel marking system. None can question such a statement; what should be realized, however, is that maintaining the integrity of the organisation should be pursued by all legal means.  A nation cannot kill all its criminals on the pretext that it wants a crime-free society. It must use other measures, one of which happens to be the prison system which removes the criminal from society for varying periods of time.
The idea of polygraphy first surfaced when former president Bharrat Jagdeo opted to have it used within the Guyana Revenue Authority. A number of Customs officers were found wanting and sent on leave for extended periods. Many have been on this extended leave for as long as two years. The Guyana Energy Agency may argue that these are public servants and their dismissal is governed by certain clauses which do not apply to the contract workers.
However, that apart, in no part of the world is the polygraph relied on. In the United States which places a heavy reliance on technology the results of polygraph testing cannot be used as evidence in a court of law.
“The efficacy of polygraphs is debated in the scientific community. In 2001, a significant fraction of the scientific community considered polygraphy to be pseudoscience. In 2002, a review by the National Academies of Science found that testing can discriminate lying from truth telling at rates above chance, though below perfection,” according to Wikipedia.
Another expert published, “There are a variety of instances in which you may be subjected to a polygraph, or lie detector examination. These tests can be a source of tremendous anxiety, even for people with nothing to hide, and for good reason. Polygraph examinations are interrogations, and it is all too common for innocent people to fail them for no reason, resulting in the denial of employment or false criminal accusations. Fortunately, they are easy to trick.”
One must then wonder how is it that the Guyana Energy Agency has placed total reliance on polygraph testing to the extent that it can terminate the services of people whom it perceives fail the test.
“There are no machines and no experts that can detect with a high degree of accuracy when people, selected randomly, are lying and when they are telling the truth.”
Sadly, this practice of sacking people based on an unreliable and unscientific method is being practised and executed in Guyana. We saw law enforcers dismissed, and Government officers suffering a similar fate.
What is strange is that no one has had the gumption to test their dismissal in a court of law.

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