A lot of it's caused by "pay peanuts, get monkeys" regarding salary policies set by HR people, at least where good technical folk are concerned.

HR a required form of corporate insulation, protecting the corporate entity from law suits based upon unfair treatment of people the elite fail to accept. the whole point of HR is avoid direct contact with people the elite of the company feel are less than acceptable and afford them the chance never to meet them and claim a third party did the dirty work. In the real world recruiters go to the IVY schools and meet those that are not related to those already on the inside. So for example if a Captain of Industry has a son or daughter that wishes a position daddy mentions it at the club or at the dinner party and the interview is conducted and the agreement reached immediately. Now if gifted and talented folks happen to go to juniors school they might also obtain a position that way. If the people that go to juniors school are busy working they can meet the recruiter who passes the gifted to the leite directly. If you are like me you meet HR and never get the gig. The whole point of HR is filter out not in the people that the elite might find difficult to work with. If you are in HR you must prove that you do not beling there that is the only strategy that works. It is like being called to the dean in school you must lie to them to show that you being is a mistake and that you should have been passed on to the elite. It is the I was switched at birth scenario pretend you are the lost prince rather than the pauper. The internet created havoc in the elite because it became important and their children being dullards never considered anything other than social climbing as a skill. So they took it made it and institution and re-invented IT processing with jargon, buzz words, and social filters to avoid having to hire the unacceptable. They achieved their goal and quickly outsourced the lot to India a perrect solution because workd is below what is considered an acceptable activity. I say (a four letter word that starts with f) the HR and disqualify the institutional processes as vacant of any value. By making known the lunacy found in corporate processes the elites will get itchy and find that people hate being toyed with. You see the elites really want to be loved for who they are not, because the reality is they are almost like you and I simple folks who have a great thing going who do not want to share it. So lie in fact compound the lie with claims of nobility be the italian duke you always wanted to be the elites will rescue you from HR hell because they are telling themselves that they are the lost prince it is the lie that lets them sleep. The nightmare they run from is that this game of less than truthful practices will crumble like a house of cards and they will wake up the pauper they know they are. Poverty and the fear of it prompt us to lie the bigger the lie the greater the fear. The other side of the looking glass is our process protects us from these HR liars but the process is confirmation of a greater lie they tell themselves one where they believe that they are playing fairly and they are the lost prince. In the end we all live happily ever after six feet under making food for the worms.

Interesting question. I have myself become interested in it when I changed cultures for the third time in my life. However, the more I observe and think about it, the more convinced I become that it has very little to do with culture and mostly boils down to ordinary economics. It is the differences in the economic infrastructure (in the broadest sense of the term) that trigger different lying patterns in different places. People who move across cultures quickly learn to lie the new way and stop lying the old way. In nearly all cases, lying is done in an economically rational fashion, and it only causes outrage (as in some of the cited articles) when the perception of the reality and hence the judgement about the rationality of the lie by the liar is off. Rational lying is acceptable (and expected) everywhere; if one is after the question of what lies are acceptable, one should ask what lies are economically rational (though not necessarily efficient).
Most commonly, lying is applied to tilt the balance one way or another in cases of rampant asymmetric information. The job market is particularly infested with lies, because it is riddled with information asymmetries. But it's not the only place.

For example, take any kind of coercion into paying (legitimate or not) through spot-ckecks, where the inability to verify everybody is obvious. If you find such a situation, be it taxes, free riding on public transport, copyright matters, or anything else you can think of, you are most likely to find out that in that particular area lying is also rampant both by the coerced and the coercing parties. What makes it appear as a cultural difference is simple institutional difference between countries. When institutions change, lying patterns adopt lightning-fast. It's just not very frequent that institutions change, by their very definition. Hence the false perception of cultural differences.

In this particular case, to answer your question, it is not America's culture that is flawed: it's her institutions. Too many institutions are based on advantages in asymmetric information. Hence the problem.

To offer a specific example not related to HR, here's freeriding on public transport.

In North America, relatively few people do it, because few people use public transport as such, so the operators can verify a large number of people. Hence, those few who do freeride from time to time, keep silent about it. The majority honestly pays the fares, and the companies are honest about how they enforce them. Mostly.

In Hungary, by contrast, public transport is vital; almost everybody uses it on a daily basis and checking the majority would be both inefficient and impossible. Hence the empty theat of prosecution, false statistics and other tricks employed by the operator company on one hand, and the massive free-riding on the other hand. The operator lies in many ways that it can check one's ticket, the public lies that it has a ticket.
But here's a twist: people lie far less about these lies to one another (on both sides): those who do freeride, openly admit it (and some might even brag about how clever they were either catching freeriders or freeriding themselves). It is almost perfectly acceptable. Because it is obviously rational.

Is this a cultural difference between Hungarians and Americans? Nope. But it sure as hell looks like one, and many people will happily point it out as one.

In another example, more familiar to most techies, look at the amount of lying and the resources mobilized to the ends of successful deception around digital music and software distribution. The publishers lie about their enforcement capabilities, the public lies about what they use their high-speed connections for. Both sides of this battle dedicate a large part of their resources to deceiving the other party: the money spent on scary advertising campaigns far exceeds the money spent on actual copyright enforcement, while a lot of excellent engineering effort goes into hiding what and from/to where people are down/uploading. This is an arms-race at deliberate deception. And both of these "lies" appear to be perfectly acceptable. Why? Because of the information asymmetry involved. Nothing to do with culture or upbringing.

Final remark: Do I lie? I am not qualified to answer this question. Go find out for yourself, if you need to know. (if pressed hard, I will say that I don't, but don't take my word for it)
The same, I'm sure, goes for you. Whoever "you" might be.

The only way to successfully combat a "culture" of deception is to remove information asymmetry from relationships and especially institutions.

http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/5/emw240513.htm

From the US

"Anderson noted that the General Accounting Office recently reported that nearly 200,000 federal employees have lied on their resumes."

A self serving press release. Probably a germ of truth in it.