The Bulgarian Pharmaceutical Union (BPU) said on July 22 that several candidates applying for permission to open a pharmacy have presented counterfeit diplomas for the required master's in pharmacy degree.

In Bulgaria, there are only two institutions for higher education that are accredited to issue such diplomas, Gabriela Vouteva, chief secretary of the union, told The Sofia Echo. One is the pharmaceutical department of the Sofia's Medical University, in addition to the same department of the Plovdiv Medial University.

Most of the suspected diplomas are issued abroad, Vouteva said. Primarily they come from Russia, Tajikistan and some other of the former soviet republics, she added.

Vouteva explained that when someone is applying to open a pharmacy and has to go through the procedure established by the Health Care Ministry, BPU is entitled to take a stand whether the candidate's credentials are suited for the endeavour. One of the mandatory requirements is a valid diploma, proving the person went through the whole course of education and is qualified to sell drugs with no hazard to the patients, Vouteva said.

The union suspected a total of eight fake diplomas for the last year, and so far it has received a confirmation of invalidity for two of them, after the Bulgarian Ministry of Education did a thorough check of all presented documentation, Vouteva explained. The other six are still being evaluated.

"It is a long process that could take up to six months," she said and added that, practically, none of the involved institutions has an established mechanism through which to inspect the validity of every submitted application.

On the question what prompted BPU to contest the validity of the documents, Vouteva replied that the pharmaceutical community in Bulgaria is rather small. "One does not have to be a detective to figure out that when a person presents a diploma signifying at least five years of studying abroad, and at the same time that person has never left the country, something does not look right."

BPU's tip-off of fake diplomas comes in a situation where just recently the National Evaluation and Accreditation Agency received a positive assessment from an audit done by higher education experts from various European countries.

This assessment would allow the agency to enter the registry of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education. In the long run, this would eventually mean that diplomas received from accredited Bulgarian universities would be automatically recognised anywhere in Europe. This would benefit Bulgarians holding degrees in the regulated professions such as medicine, law and architecture.

As of now, Bulgarian citizens applying for a job abroad need to have an annonation issued by the Ministry of Education and signifying the diploma is valid.