To CATCH A LIAR.

Business often succeed or fail because of the levels of honesty of its employees - both prospective and incumbent. To clinch a position, job applicants will often lie about their qualifications and experience, and their attitudes. Deceitful employees will lie, often convincingly, if they are suspected of dishonesty in the workplace.

How does the busy manager know for certain whether or not an employee is lying? The answer is a new system which quickly detects states of stress, and then measure and grade them accordingly. The new-age technology pin-points the cause of stress, analyses it and lets the user know whether or not the speaker's stress is caused by a lie, excitement, an exaggeration or a bending of the truth.

TrusterPro uses deception patterns in its detection process. "For instance," says James Geldenhuys, MD of Voice IT, the company bringing the revolutionary product onto the South African market, "if the subject is highly confused and excited, chances are quite high that he is lying; or if the subject is extremely alert - under extreme tension - and is trying to avoid thinking, this also indicates clearly that the person is almost certainly being deceptive."

In order to lie convincingly, liars must first keep as closely to the facts as possible so that what they say comes across as a plausible substitute for the truth. No matter how the lie is delivered, its intention is always to deceive, whether it is a deliberate falsification of the truth or an omission of information.

"Interesting things happen when you lie," Geldenhuys points out. "The lying process sparks a chemical and physical reaction in the liar. The body releases adrenaline and that stimulates heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, muscle tension, sweat glands, and causes slight tremors in the voice. While the liar may deceive with words, guilt can be betrayed by other small signals - such as visual, vocal and verbal cues, evasive responses and vocal stress.

The brain also plays a major role in the act of speaking by closely monitoring thought and speech flow and instinctively reflects mental events such as confusion, pain, hesitation and deception. In truthful situations, on the other hand, mainstream thought process is fluent and uninterrupted.

"Our voice stress analyser is a significant advance on other types of voice analysis technology," Geldenhuys points out. "Using selected microtremor technology, it detects and analyses any deviation from the truth and presents it graphically and textually. What makes TrusterPro unique is the accuracy with which it can identify - more precisely than ever before - deceptive stress in the plethora of human emotional conditions."

According to Geldenhuys, the system is ideal for the corporate world because it takes technology a few stages further and delivers precise information on tension, fear, attempts to outsmart or answer cynically. "It even identifies the subject's level of thinking," he says.