EmployeeScreenIQ Blog

Everybody’s doing it; background checks that is.  Simon Cowell has reportedly dropped three contestants from his British TV show, Red or Black, after he performed criminal background checks and found something he didn’t like (what he found was unspecified).  Evidently, he learned the hard way that performing these checks was necessary when it came out that the show’s first winner had served two years in prison for assaulting another man.

Everyone has their own motivation for conducting background checks.  Some do it to protect theiremployees, customers and reputation, some to avoid making a bad hire. Unfortunately, many do it because the have experienced costly incidents that could have been avoided.  Food for thought.

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Lieutenant Bob Hansen of the Medford Police Department in Oregon has some advice for employers: “It will cost a little to hire a background check, but it’s well worth it.”  This after a bookkeeper at Mellelo Coffee Roasters was arrested on charges of first-degree aggravated theft and five counts of first-degree theft for embezzling more than $40,000 for the company’s coffers.

When the Medford police did a little digging, they found a pattern of theft that began in 2008 including theft of cash and doctoring books to hide losses.

No need for me to get on my soapbox on this.  We all know the moral of this story. However if you know me, brevity is not my forte, so I thought I would share a personal story.

My grandfather and uncle owned real estate development company in the 70′s and 80′s and their most trusted employee was in fact, their bookkeeper.  For the sake of protecting the guilty, we’ll call this person “Mary”.  Mary was like family.  They trusted her with everything and compensated her well.  Sometime in the late 80′s they either noticed unaccounted expenses or had some type of financial audit.

You can imagine their surprise when they found out that Mary had stolen tens of thousands of dollars over the years.  And remember, that kind of money was no chump change back then (nor is it now).  Now, of course the concept of a background check wouldn’t catch on with your average employer until the 90′s, so I can’t really fault them for not performing proper due diligence before hiring her.  However, this did teach me an important lesson which is that any one can steal from you.  We’ve seen it with trusted employees, consultants and even other family members.  Now, that background checks are the norm, it’s important to use them, whether you are hiring a friend, or a friend of a friend or a complete stranger.

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An Illinois man is suing both his former employer and their background screening provider because they errantly reported that he was a registered sex offender and didn’t take the time to ensure that the record found actually belonged to him.

Stories like this really get my blood boiling because they make us all look bad.  The perception is that all employment screeners don’t care whether they report accurate information or not and that employers blindly make hiring decisions without allowing the candidate to refute the information.  It is also stories like these that cause government agencies and advocates to scream that employers are misusing background checks and that the practice requires further regulation and guidelines.

Here’s the story according to ABC News:

“In October 2010, [Samuel] Jackson was offered a job as a live chat response specialist for Optics Planet, an Illionois-based online catalog for binoculars, camera lenses and other optical equipment. The company then contracted Infotrack to run a background track, and Infotrack returned information tying Jackson to seven ‘possible matches’ from the national sex offender registry, according to the suit.”

“The background check misidentified Jackson, who is a white male in his twenties, as a black male in his fifties who had been convicted of sex crimes in states where Jackson has never lived.”

We’ve talked for years about the importance of confirming and verifying the information that is found before reporting it to an employer.  The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires Consumer Reporting Agencies to follow reasonable procedures to assure accuracy and to notify individuals when a report may adversely affect their job application.

In EmployeeScreenIQ’s case, we won’t report a record without confirming the proper identifiers.  We look for a combination of the following matches name, date of birth and, or social security number.  That means a name match only is not sufficient to authenticate a criminal record.

Furthermore, we work with our clients to ensure that they provide the candidates’ with proper notice when they take adverse action and allow them to dispute any information they believe is erroneous.

In this case, it seems that neither of these things happened.  And rather than face the negative publicity, the expense of litigation and potential damages, it would have been a heck of a lot easier to just follow the proper protocol.

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I think we can all agree that going back to school sucks.  As a little kid I remember the dread I felt waking up for the first day of school and knowing that my summer was officially over.  Even as an adult, I get that same feeling for my kids.  So, it was with great anxiety that I put my fourth and first graders on the bus last week. (If you are a regular on this blog, you know what comes next).

Enter, my annual rant on school background checks.

You know, it’s a blessing and a curse to be in this business.  You can help a lot of great organization minimize the risk of hiring the wrong person.  You can also help these organizations validate that their candidate is the right choice.  Over the years, I have been exposed to some of the worst things people in this world can do.  And just when I see what I think is the most disgusting and heinous behavior, something else comes along that sets a new low.

To me, the worst offenses are those that deal with the abuse of children; whether physical, mental or sexual.  So you can imagine my feeling of helplessness when I know that I am powerless to help the schools (whether my own kids’ schools or any other) to perform comprehensive criminal background checks.  The states have created a false sense of security by mandating statewide criminal background checks for school employees.  Most states can’t even mandate that all their counties report information in to them.  And even so, the information passed on might not be up to date, accurate or comprehensive.  Further, what happens if a school employee committed a crime outside of the state for which they seek employment?

One need not look very far to find an incidents of abuse in schools where the district swore they ran background checks.  It happens all the time.  And when it does, the school either is, or acts surprised that the state check didn’t reveal past convictions.  Then, they inevitably blame the lack of proper funding to remedy the situation. What could be more important than protecting our children?

So, even though I know that it will fall of deaf ears, here is my advice for conducting the type of background check that should be used in schools.  First, all school employees from the Superintendent, to the teachers, to the janitors, to the bus drivers should be checked.  The background check should consist of a county criminal background check in each county that the candidate has resided and under each name they have used.  Next, the school should perform a National Sex Offender Registry check (for obvious reasons) and a National Criminal Records Search which can identify criminal activity committed outside the counties where someone has lived.  And then if they still want to conduct a statewide search, they can feel free to do so.

I know that as a parent, I would feel much more comfortable that our schools have done everything they can reasonably can do to protect our children and provide them with a safe learning environment.  We live in a crazy world and overwhelming majority of our school employee are there for the right reasons.  But unfortunately, there are always those that have other intentions and until they cease to exist, we need to take steps to ensure that they never step foot in a school.  Taking the steps I listed above would significantly mitigate the possibility of it happening and the schools should do everything in their power to take advantage of the tools corporations have been using for years.

Until then, I’ll keep holding my breath.

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As you might expect, we are receiving numerous notifications of court closures throughout the Eastern seaboard due to the damages and flooding caused by Hurricane Irene.  Any one conducting criminal background checks in the following states can expect to run into delays.  Here’s what we have so far for closures on Monday, August 29, 2011.

Vermont – All courts closed.   Montpelier is flooded so there may a lengthy delay throughout the state.

New Hampshire – So far, we are only aware of closures in Cheshire, Grafton, Rockingham, Sullivan and Coosand counties and the Keene District Court.

New York – The following courts are closed until further notice: Schenectady, Greene, Ulster, Orange, Essex, Clinton, Delaware.

Connecticut – So far, we haven’t been able to reach the courts.  Stay tuned.

New Jersey – All courts closed.

Maine – Late openings due to Administrative week.  No storm related delays.

This is a fluid situation, so please stay tuned for further updates as events unfold.

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Question: What do the producers of Sesame Street and the Iowa City Fair have in common?

Answer:  They both don’t want the publicity they drew when it was discovered that the fair hired a registered sex offender convicted in 2005 of lascivious acts with a 7 year old girl to wear a Cookie Monster costume and greet children.

I don’t know, just a thought, but do you think maybe the fair should have conducted an employment background check?  Between a criminal record search and a check of the sex offender registry they most surely would have discovered that maybe the should move on to the next applicant.  But hey, that’s just me.

According to Reuters,  “The owner of the costume company that hired Rogers says that they did not run a background check. The owner said that Rogers needed a job, so he was put to work almost immediately. Rogers would have also been sent to work at other private events and birthday parties if he hadn’t been discovered by a parole supervisor who recognized him at the fair.”

Thank goodness nothing happened.

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The Fayetteville Observer is reporting that Cumberland county, North Carolina plans to “ban the box” on all government jobs.  For those not familiar with the term, “ban the box” refers to employers excluding the question on their job application which asks the applicant if they have been convicted of criminal activity.  While we’ve written extensively on this topic, I’ve never been a vocifierous supporter or detractor of this measure.

But given the EEOC’s recent hearing on the use of criminal background checks, I’m beginning to warm to the concept.  Banning the box will effectively give everyone a fair chance to be interviewed for a given position.  While not asking about an individual’s criminal history on the application will just delay this eventually coming out, it will give the applicant the opportunity to shine in the interview and even come clean about their past, offering an explanation about what happened and when.

Of course, the employer will still conduct a background check, but at least the candidate will have been allowed a fair chance to convince the employer that they are the right person for the job.  Perhaps measures such as these will make the EEOC moderate their position.

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Just as I was about to abandon my summer of EEOC bashing, I came across this story in USA Today which demonstrates why precluding or limiting employers’ ability to conducting criminal background checks can have disastrous consequences.

Orlando Hotel Worker with Criminal Record Accused of Raping Guest

In Orlando, local NBC affiliate WESH 2 News reports that a hotel guest says a hotel employee used his master key to get into her room and rape her.

The victim said he raped her while she begged him to stop, the TV station reported yesterday afternoon.

Police arrested Irving Gifford, 38, a hotel employee who lives at the hotel – and who, it turns out, has been in state prison seven different times, according to the story, citing Florida Department of Corrections information. WESH 2 News raised the issue with the hotel:

Hotel management refused to tell WESH 2 News if they knew about Gifford’s criminal history, why he had an all-access pass to rooms and whether they run background checks on workers.

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My guess is that they did not run a background check.  Of course, we don’t yet know what these convictions were for, but small time criminals don’t serve time in state prisons 7 different times.  If they had known about these records, there is no way this person would have been access to guest rooms.

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A Cincinnati city employee now stands accused of embezzling over $750,000 from the city’s employees union.  And like many similar situations before this and many that will occur after, the chain of events was entirely preventable.  The city failed to conduct an employment background check on Diana Frey which would have revealed a 1983 conviction for theft and numerous convictions for writing bad checks from between 1988 and 1990.

We’ve become so immune to these stories to the point that I rarely blog on them anymore.  However, in light of the EEOC’s recent hearing on the fairness of criminal background checks, I just can’t ignore this.

First, shame on the city of Cincinnati for failing to protect their employees.  Now, for the EEOC.  If it were up some of their commissioners, those employers smart enough to conduct due diligence on potential employees would not be able to consider this information.  Why?  Because these events occurred as far back as 28 years ago, they believe that such records cannot adequately predict future behavior.  Well, they sure would have helped here.  Anyone care to disagree?

In Diana Frey Case, Everybody Dropped the Ball

Diana Frey’s alleged embezzlement of more than $750,000 from the Cincinnati city employees union she created is a story of the failure of effective oversight at every stage for nearly two decades.

Despite clear warning signs, agencies and individuals inside and outside City Hall responsible for overseeing Frey or her union repeatedly failed to take steps that could have averted the alleged wrongdoing or at least exposed it years earlier – potentially saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Those failures, stretching from before she began her city career to her indictment, include oversight breakdowns in which:

A criminal record and a falsified job application did nothing to slow Frey’s movement through a succession of city jobs in the 1990s.

• Read documents related to Frey

The U.S. Department of Labor, which has responsibility for protecting union assets, began looking closely at CODE only after the union’s treasurer tipped it off early this year.

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Oh don’t mind me.  I’m just playing word association with the following phrase “EEOC Meeting to Discuss Use of Criminal Records”.  Feel free to send in your own suggestion for my word cloud above.

Why the sarcasm?  Where to start?  We asked earlier this week if the EEOC was willing to have an honest and open dialogue on employers’ use of criminal background checks. We got our answer pretty quickly.  If the list of those who would testify wasn’t answer enough, check out the press release which the EEOC distributed just hours after the 4 hour meeting was concluded.  The key word here is “distributed” since it was clearly “written” well before the meeting.

Instead of listening to both sides of the issue, the EEOC paraded out a cadre of individuals damning the use of criminal records in the hiring process.  No one was there to talk about the liability employers face.  No one was asked to talk about the victims of violent criminal activity in the workplace.  No one was called on to talk about the mounting losses employers shoulder due to internal theft.  Oddly, no one was there to discuss the nation’s largest consumer of employment background checks, the U.S. government whom the last time I checked, the EEOC was a part of.

They favored testimony from the Department of Justice who offered the Blumstein study on the point of redemption as ironclad and unimpeachable rather than as a limited study, based on limited criminal activity, based on a limited geographical area.  They listened to testimony that the FBI’s database only includes about 50% of all criminal records.  Never mind that those in our industry use far more accurate methods to conduct criminal background checks.  They heard testimony that talked about employers running roughshod over applicants’ rights and ignored that fact the the FCRA and state laws provide protection.

According to those in attendance, here’s where it stands.  There are two EEOC commissioners who think that the commission should overhaul their guidance on employers use of criminal background checks.  There are two commissioners who either think that the current guidelines are sufficient or should be slightly modified.  And there is one commissioner who seems to be in the middle and will most likely be the ultimate deciding factor.

In the meantime, the EEOC has allowed a 15 day comment period on the issue.  Perhaps they’ll consider opinions counter to theirs’ then.  I’ll be holding my breath until then.

Stay tuned.  We have definitely not heard the last of this issue.

P.S. Once the smoke clears out of my ears, I’ll publish some of the materials that were provided to the EEOC in support of criminal background checks.

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