If you ask 10 HR professionals what they consider to be a good background check, you’d probably get 10 different answers.  Why?  Because the term “background check” is a very loose term.  When it comes to contract employees, it is vital that companies work closely with their recruiters and temporary staffing agencies to define a screening process.  What they believe to be a thorough background check could significantly differ from what you consider to be a thorough background check.  Nick Fishman authored an article for employeescreenIQ‘s quarterly newsletter, The Verifier, which examines this very issue and offers great advice on how you can work with your recruiters and temporary staffing agencies to set up a screening program to meet your needs.

When companies don’t get involved with the process, they run the risk of employing an individual they otherwise wouldn’t had they known specifics about their past.  A Spokane, WA-based business knows this all too well.

Couple accused of embezzling $800,000

Bill Morlin
Staff writer – SpokesmanReview.com
November 20, 2008

A woman and her boyfriend are accused of embezzling $814,000 from two Spokane advertising agencies and using the money for down payments on houses, luxury vehicles and airline tickets for a youth football team’s trip to California.

Michelle A. Wing and Kenneth Marsh are each accused in a federal indictment of conspiracy and multiple counts of bank fraud in a white collar crime investigation handled by the FBI.

Wing also is charged with two additional counts of identity theft – opening credit card accounts, using her boss’ name, Social Security number and birth date without his knowledge.

The credit card fraud, which lasted several months, reportedly included the $30,000 purchase of a 2008 Super Bowl package for the couple.

Wing, who is 33, was arrested and taken into federal custody last month for violating terms of her supervised release from a similar federal bank fraud conviction in Montana, court documents show.

She currently is being held at a federal correctional facility at SeaTac, and is expected to be returned to Spokane soon to be arraigned on the new charges.

FBI agents arrested Marsh Wednesday at a Spokane concrete company where he works as a dispatcher.

A short time later during an initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Cynthia Imbrogno, the 39-year-old suspect was ordered held in jail without bail until a detention hearing on Friday.

The indictment alleges Wing was hired in December 2005 by Centaur Group, a Spokane business which provides “administrative services” for two separate advertising companies, E Media, owned by Eric Hixson, and Power Marketing Services, owned by Ryan Pirello.

The two businessmen, who jointly own Centaur Group, said Wednesday they hired Wing to do bookkeeping work through a temporary employment agency, based in Spokane, whose owner had assured them he had done a criminal background check.

They had no idea, Hixson and Pirello said, that the bookkeeper they hired was on federal supervised release for a 2001 bank fraud conviction in Missoula, Mont.

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