Good (and Bad) Background Checks

More organizations use background checks to investigate criminal histories and to make hiring and firing decisions. It's up to CSOs to make sure this powerful but flawed weapon doesn't backfire.

Sixty-four of the 120 convicted criminals in the study came back with spotless criminal histories. "The company we hired did what was considered the gold standard approach; they went to the courthouse and checked records," says Shawn Bushway, an assistant professor at the university and a criminologist. He won't reveal the name of the company that did the checks, but he does say, "This was not one of those national $9.95 searches," which are widely acknowledged to be suspect.

Inadvertently, Bushway and his colleagues had revealed in a dramatic way something that everyone in the industry knows but hates to acknowledge: Even the best companies' reports contain errors. Criminals look innocent, or the innocent look criminal.

"Doing a background check is still a very manual process, because the government agencies that create the records are largely paper-based systems," says James Lee, chief marketing officer of ChoicePoint. "I'm not going to deny that there are errors, because in any system that involves human beings or technology, there are going to be errors."

Lee downplays the number of errors at ChoicePoint, saying that of the 6 million-plus background checks it conducts annually, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of them require an amendment. He also acknowledges that the company is doing good business in a joint endeavor with HotJobs.com, which allows job seekers to run a background check on themselves to look for mistakes.

So how do errors happen? Social Security numbers get transposed during data entry. Names, addresses or dates of birth get mistyped. Identities get confused: a problem that has worsened because some jurisdictionsincluding federal courthouseshave removed identifiers such as Social Security numbers from their records for privacy reasons. There are rising concerns about identity theft, particularly the growing practice of a criminal using someone else's name when being arrested or convicted of a crime. It's also hard to get a thorough report. There are thousands of counties in the United States, all with their own records departments. Misdemeanors and felonies might appear in separate repositories. An overturned conviction that should have been erased from the record, might still appear on files at a corrections department.

"The overall reliability of the criminal background check, the way it's done today, is suspect," says Don Osterberg, vice president of capacity development and safety at Schneider National, where he oversees a program that performs criminal investigations, motor vehicle history checks and drug testing on all new drivers and owner operators. "It's better than nothing, but the probability of not finding a criminal conviction is pretty high."