A story from the past on this subject which shows how naive we were in those days.
In Hong Kong as many of you know there was and is the ICAC, the Independent Commission Against Corruption. One of their remits was to ensure that all licences issued by the government were correctly issued and relevant, and any qualifications for that licence, and indeed the holder of that licence was all legitimate.
My memory fails me but I think it was in about 1988 that the ICAC realised that the CAA issued licences, and were part of the government. So they set up an internal inquiry as to the veracity of these documents. Apart from giving the CAA licencing section a hard time, telling them to put their affairs in order and make it more like an ISO 9001 administration, they came to the airlines to see how we renewed licences every 6 months or year with the Instrument Rating. When it got to the bit in the briefing room where the candidate hands over his licence before the test for checking the two ICAC guys became vary animated. "Do you check the licence against the ID card? No we said, and the licence itself did not have a photo ID. "How you know this the right person?" and we made mumblings about rostering and small airline etc.
It was one of their big concerns with the airline procedures. They said it could be the guy's brother taking the test, and cheekily he said "Cos you know we all look the same to you". Apparently they used to have massive problems with bus licences and HGV licences at testing as most people used to send a friend. They assumed it happened in the airlines.
We never did get to cross check the Hong Kong ID card against the licence of the candidate. But as the airline got larger and I did not even recognise the managers anymore I think it might have shown that we were serious about fraudulent testing.
FWIW