pursue or not?

we hired a helper two years ago. for me, she is passable. i had quite a few problems with her and took a while to sort out (she kept breaking things to the point that we had to prepare a warning letter to tell her she had to be financially responsible for breakages). she is however a decent cook and my family likes her cooking. i cook also but i can't possibly fit everything into daily schedule.

we found her through a website and used an agent she recommended to do the papers. the agent turned out to be completely helpless.

when the time came to renew her contract, i thought long and hard. but the most important thing being my family, i renewed her contract without the agent. we haven't had anything stolen or very valuable damaged.

at the time we hired her, she had only worked 4 months for a chinese family as the cook. she said they they were mean to her so she looked for a new job. we tested her cooking, etc and was hired on that basis. she also produced many reference letters from her home country. i know that letters can be faked but i lived in her home country and i would know if they were fabricated (i don't believe they were). because an agent was involved, i was only shown copies of her visa, etc, never her passport. i specifically during the interviews asked her in details about her past history, etc and she said her job with the mean mainlander was her first job in hong kong.

now that we do our own renewal, i asked to see her passport. at first she was hesitant and lied that immigration never asked for her passport. i told her that is rubbish and insisted on seeing it to get a copy of her visa. her passport showed that she had actually worked for another employer in hong kong for 2.5 years. i don't understand the need to lie (and a lie you can't really cover up) and why there was no reference letter?

my husband insists that i let it go based on the argument that we have quite a bit of power over her so let's wait and see.

i disagree. it bothers me that i now i have a liar in my home (yes people lie everyday but not to this degree).

would you warn her that you know about this and tell her you are not impressed by this?

Now you know that she lied to you about previous employment, why don't you simply ask her why she never told you she'd been employed by someone else for 2.5 years, instead of just the 4 months she told you about? It's unlikely she'll tell you the truth now, as she obviously has her reasons, and maybe for whatever reason her previous employer wouldn't have given her a good reference, but as cara has said, you've employed her for the past 2 years without any real problem so perhaps she learned from her mistakes with the previous employer. If you chose not to renew her contract, you could end up with someone worse ...