Patrick Imbardelli is not the first top executive to leave his employer over his CV and he will not be the last.

The chief executive of Intercontinental Hotels Group’s Asia-Pacific unit announced his resignation on Thursday following a review of his academic qualifications “as previously presented to the company”.

Many have fallen foul of reviews, and surveys suggest that significant percentages of CVs, or resumés, are economical with the truth.

The issues at IHG appear to have been what Michael Whittington of Kroll says is the commonest issue uncovered by the risk consulting group’s background screening division – exaggerated or misleading information on educational or professional qualifications.

IHG said Mr Imbardelli had told it he had degrees from three universities, but had only attended classes at them without graduating.

Much the same happened more than 20 years ago in the 1985 bid battle between Guinness and Argyll Foods for control of the Distillers drinks group. Argyll’s bid failed after it emerged that chairman James Gulliver’s claim to have been educated at Harvard Business School was false. He gave up the job three years later.

Wall Street in the 1980s had its scandal when the late “Mad Dog” Jeff Beck, one of the giants of the mergers and acquisitions scene, resigned from Drexel Burnham Lambert after being exposed as a fantasist.

Ronald Zarrella, chairman and chief executive of Bausch & Lomb, the eyecare products maker, forfeited his annual bonus for 2002 after he admitted misrepresenting his educational record.

David Edmondson resigned last year as chief executive of RadioShack, the US consumer electronics retailer, after admitting he had not received a BSc from Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College.

And Kenneth Lonchar, chief financial officer of the appropriately named Veritas software group, resigned in 2002 after it was revealed he did not hold a claimed Stanford MBA.

In the UK, Alison Ryan stood down as £125,000-a-year director of communications at Manchester United in 2000 after a newspaper said she had taken a second-class degree at Cambridge – not the first she had claimed. Other infractions on her job application led her to say: “We all do things in life we regret.”

In 2005, a former health service chief executive from Solihull was given a 12-month prison sentence suspended for two years for faking qualifications to get the £115,000-a-year position.

A 2001 UK survey by the Mori polling organisation found that almost 30 per cent of working people had lied on job applications. Of those more than a quarter had given false salary details, 9 per cent misrepresented their skills and 3 per cent had lied about a criminal record.

Financial services companies vet permanent employees to satisfy the regulators, according to Mr Whittington, and some do so for temporary and contract staff. One human resources professional in the industry who did not wish to be named said the firm routinely checked every candidate’s qualifications, credit history and criminal record.

She said most resumés were fine and the most common lies were about not qualifications but grades, precise skills and levels of responsibilities.

Drilling down into a candidate’s competency was part of interviewing and key things to look for were vague answers or a candidate taking offence at a seemingly benign question, she said.

Many companies check out only staff who have financial responsibilities or those in senior positions where the risk is seen as greatest.

The Risk Advisory Group, an employee-screening service, surveyed more than 3,700 CVs last year and found significant lies on 20 per cent of them, on topics such as court judgments and qualifications. CV discrepancies were on the increase and becoming more serious, it said.

Inaccuracies uncovered by the survey included undisclosed directorships and bankruptcies. In one case there had been an investigation by a previous employer into the leaking of sensitive information to a competitor.

Executives who have told fibs about qualifications at the start of their careers often assume their dishonesty will be hard to discover decades later, says Sal Remtulla, associate director of employee screening at the Risk Advisory Group.

“But the universities hold records for long periods and we can check them.”

The idea that a headhunter would need to check the educational details of a senior executive surprised Brian Hamill, chief executive of Imprint, the headhunting group.

“It is easy to check with the records department of a university or cross-reference professional qualifications,” he said.

While there are bound to be some who lie about grades, Mr Hamill said: “What really matters are the soft references you get from speaking to the market.”

Sabine Gardener of Cobalt Partners, which does due diligence on executives for private equity companies, said she would never dream of checking what someone did in their early 20s. “The most important thing is the person’s record of value creation,” she said.

FT.com’s online forum on the ethics of CV embellishing came up with one useful yardstick. It came from a former army officer who said he had undersold himself.

“Your CV should make your closest friend gag but not vomit. Underselling does you no favours .”