It’s that time of year again.  A time for us to enjoy what we all know is the Super Bowl of all holidays, Thanksgiving!  And in honor of the season, we again offer up our annual Background Check turkey honorees.  So without further ado, I give you this year’s Turkeys.

• Lisa Dorhauer who stole over $46,000 from a children’s charity.  Avoidable?  Most definitely.  She had two theft convictions on her record at the time of her hiring.
• Cookie Monster.  Okay, not the real Cookie Monster.  But the Iowa State Fair hired a registered sex offender to greet children in regaled in this character’s costume.  Needless to say, they neglected to conduct a background check.
• Donald Johnson, a NASDAQ employee defrauded investors out  of $750,000.  Guess what, Johnson admitted to consuming Schedule II drugs while on duty as a nurse and falsifying hospital records in order to steal these drugs from the hospital he worked at.
• The EEOC, for overzealous prosecution of not one, but at least two cases this year against employers for unfair background check practices which led to them being penalized (and in turn taxpayers) for nearly $4,000,000.
• Kazimierz Karasek, a truck driver who made an illegal left turn which resulted in his crashing his semi into a commuter train.  Mr. Karasek had over 50 moving violations on his record since 1986.
• The state of Massachussettes for continuing to insist the their state criminal record index, CORI is the only way to conduct background checks.  Tell that to victims of rape, child abuse and a myriad criminal activities in which the perpetrators were convicted of similar crimes outside of the state.
• Peter Gwinnell, and UK man who was hired as a bank CEO after claims of being Oxford and Harvard educated and past employment at JP Morgan.  It turns out that none of those claims were true.
• Adam Wheeler, a man who faked his way into Harvard after claiming to have attended MIT and a prestigious prep school.  Again, neither of these claims were true.  After being convicted for these offenses, Wheeler was recently arrested again for trying to get a job after claiming he graduated from Harvard.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got for now.  Need to make our annual pilgrammage to Cleveland for Turkey Day.  Have a safe and happy holiday.  But before I go, take a moment to enjoy my favorite Thanksgiving song of all time.

P.S. This post is dedicated to our director of business development, John Sferry; the only man who loves Thanksgiving as much as I do.

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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