Really? What makes you say that? To be clear of the situation, he received ITA for FSW, accepted and submitted application with FSW.
May be CIC gets really nice and transfer every thing to CEC (I doubt they can do that since there would be files / forms generated based upon the info he filled) and the system would not have asked for all details needed to validate CEC.
I never expect CIC to go that much out of the way. They would just prefer to refuse and expect the applicant to reapply. It is not in the ITA stage, it is an application submitted a while ago.