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.

Companies, in hopes of getting a more complete criminal record, are increasingly pushing for access to FBI criminal background checks (which now can be requested only for employees in certain regulated industries). But even those files are incomplete. In the University of Maryland study, a national search of FBI files found records for only 87 of the 120 study subjects. Only part of that was due to the fact that FBI files generally do not contain misdemeanors, and that some police departments don't report to the FBI. "The FBI data has holes too, because it's coming from the state repositories," Bushway says.

In some ways, demand for access to national records has made the situation worse. Many private companies are amassing records from city, county and state jurisdictions, and advertising them as national searches. Because of the wildly disparate information that's available in the first place, the fine print reveals their limitations. For example, the "National Criminal Index" sold by companies like Peoplefind.com has records on sexual offenders in just 32 states, and its Department of Corrections data covers 34 states: sometimes felony convictions, other times incarcerations, occasionally misdemeanors.

Because of all these vagariesand for legal reasons tooit's crucial that a company make every effort to confirm the accuracy of the information on a report before using it to make a hiring decision. That should be done by confirming the data with the original sourcesince databases may be out-of-date or inaccurate. But again, it's not clear whose responsibility it should be: the employer's or the screening firm's. Companies that don't take this extra step themselves need to make sure that it's written into vendor agreements.

The final check, of course, ought to come from the individual himself, who should know better than anyone else whether he has committed a crime. That's why the FCRA requires companies to warn individuals before acting on the information from a background check, to let them see a copy of the report and give them time to correct any errors.

Ultimately, the responsibility for correcting the record is in the hands of the individual. "It's up to them to go back to whatever court to resolve that," Equifax's Mecsics says. "We can't do that as a company." What the company can do, however, is put a process in place to help individuals correct errors, and then not hold mistakes against them.It's Not All Fair GameBut consumer advocates are afraid that that's not happening. In May, for example, Sterling Testing Systems, a background screening company in New York City, was served a $375,000 lawsuit from a Kentucky man named Edward Poore Jr. He claimed that Colgate-Palmolive had hired another candidate in the time it took him to correct an error on his background check.