Faking log book flying hours
The problem of pilots faking flying hours has been with the aviation community for decades. If done with a modicum of care the perpetrator relies on the complacency of the industry to get him an interview before others more honest in the queue.
Few chief pilots vet their employees log books for honesty and accuracy and in any case the Privacy Act could be invoked if any probe on flying hours logged got too close to home. Certainly ATO's and FOI's seldom question the integrity of flying hours logged in the log books of those under test. It becomes almost impossible to police.
Instrument flight hours mean nothing in the real world because these can be logged while "monitoring" the auto-pilot. The RFDS advertisements for pilots now require a minimum of 800 hours of Instrument Flight Rules time. That is easy to fake as no one is going to trawl back on old flight plans to see if the claimed hours were IFR. The RFDS requirements are an open invitation to falsify IFR hours. CASA look the other way as they have no regulatory interest in what IFR hours a pilot claims. In PNG a pilot seeking a job was told that he must have a minimum of 500 hours in his log book before being employed. The would be employer added with a big hint that as long as the log book showed 500 hours - he would be satisfied and so would be the insurer. Get the message?
The job of the crew member of one of our major domestic jet operators is to write up the trip log after each sector flown. All sectors that day were flown on gin clear day conditions no cloud. His captain signed off the trip record and said "Put me down for 1.2 hours of instrument flying to keep up my currency." So we have the unlovely situation of even four bar jet captains falsifying instrument time to satisfy the company records. CASA would never check.
What an indictment on the integrity of pilots as a whole - both in GA and RPT. So it seems the morale of the story is that you can go fill your boots with fake hours and no one gives a damn.