I'm back to work after a too brief holiday. Thanks to Don Toth of Edmonton and Karen Kenny of Calgary for making themselves available to aid clients with investigations in my absence.

An often asked question in my training classes, is "how do I know if a person is telling me the truth or not?" To some extant this relies on common sense, intuition and awareness about non verbal indicators of concealment, falsification and lying.

My experience is that 99% of people I've interviewed in health and safety situations are cooperative and truthful; the other 1 % stand out so much that it's obvious they are being less than truthful.

People involved in deception usually try to avoid lying by initially attempting to conceal the truth. For example, they may

• fail to answer the question,
• pretend not to understand,
• remain silent,
• feign emotion, such as anger, or
• pretend they are ill.
  

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