Given Russia’s history of suspicion and surveillance in the Soviet era it was probably inevitable that somebody would seek to legalise lie detectors for job interviews.

Moscow City Council began work this week on proposals to allow the civil service and private companies to subject prospective employees to polygraph tests.

Officials say that the city’s labour laws should be adapted to regulate the use of lie detectors because thousands of tests already take place informally each year.

Members of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, are also working with the Federal Security Service (FSB) on a law that would compel certain state organisations to use tests when hiring staff.

The security services and the Armed Forces are the only bodies legally empowered to use them at present. Yuri Kholodny, a professor of criminology at the FSB’s training academy, estimated that 50,000 tests are conducted in Russia each year.

Banks and other financial institutions often included lie detector tests in their company regulations but had no legal ground for using them. This left the results open to legal challenge from disgruntled staff and rejected job applicants.

“There are precedents for this already. That’s why we need to adjust the labour codes,” Valeri Dyatlenko, deputy chairman of the Duma’s security committee, told Kommersant newspaper.

Human rights groups fear that the reforms will leave millions of workers vulnerable to abuse by suspicious employers. Valentin Gefter, director of the Institute for Human Rights in Moscow, said: “People will become completely dependent on these machines and the specialists who interpret them.”

Critics argue that FSB officials have most to gain from the new law because it will create a lucrative market in training people to conduct polygraph tests. Mr Kholodny estimated that each test costs $100 (£50) to administer.

The Defence Ministry asked the Duma for permission last year to introduce polygraphs at army enlistment offices to weed out potentially unstable recruits. Judges appointed to federal courts are also asked to submit to a test.

Times Recommends

• A track to Shangri-La: Bhutan gets first rail link
• Avatar takings hit $600m in ten days
• Bomb disposal squad is Times’s Team of the Year