KEY POINTS:
A convict got a job as a prison guard in another Department of Corrections bungle.
The woman served time in prison and was to have started work on the other side of the bars this week.
But her fellow trainees became suspicious because she "knew a bit too
much", the Weekend Herald has learned.
Corrections investigated and found she had slipped through its checks by using a variation of her name and not declaring her criminal history.
The woman completed almost all of the six-week training course, and was sacked just before the graduation ceremony on Friday last week.
She would have been working at the newly opened Spring Hill prison in north Waikato.
Advertisements for the job called for "role models to make a positive change".
Corrections would not detail the woman's convictions yesterday. The course cost the department $4874 for each trainee, as well as wages.
Prison guards cannot have any convictions, even for less serious charges that have been wiped under the "Clean Slate" Act.
Corrections' Waikato/Central regional manager, Leanne Field, said the woman changed her name by deed poll in 2001 and applied for the job under her new name, using a driver's licence as identification.
Mrs Field said the initial checking process was the same used by other government departments.
Asked if there could be other guards who had been on the other side of the bars, Mrs Field said Corrections had faith in the "integrity and honesty" of its staff to declare convictions.
The woman's circumvention of the checks prompted Corrections Minister Phil Goff to ask the department yesterday to consider making its job applications a statutory declaration.
"This would discourage dishonesty and create the ability to prosecute people who are dishonest in filling them out," he said.
National's law and order spokesman, Simon Power, said that because of alleged corruption by guards at Rimutaka prison and elsewhere, "the last thing Corrections needs is for its systems to be so weak that it is trainees who picked up that this woman was a convict".