In today’s world background checks on other people
have become a necessary part of our business and sometimes,
personal life. What parent now days would not first check
a person’s background before they hire a nanny for
their children, for example? And what small business
wouldn’t check the background of a person hired to
manage the bank accounts of that business? Large
businesses issue Requests For Proposals to choose a
background check company that best suits their needs in
terms of the services offered, information management,
price and reliability. They then usually establish a long
term relationship with that selected company. But what
about the rest of us? Are we even allowed to “check
up” on another person and how do we go about it?
SURPRISING TRUTH # 1: Anybody can do a background check on
anybody, any time they want to. Now I know that I’ve
lost some of you who now think that I am off my rocker
because you know that there are all sorts of forms that you
have to sign with all kinds of legal warnings with criminal
penalties and such, but I’ll say it again.
“ANYBODY CAN DO A BACKGROUND CHECK ON ANYONE, ANY
TIME THEY FEEL LIKE IT.” Because I want you to read
this whole article, I am not going to explain those
statements until further into the article.
SURPRISING TRUTH # 2: There is no instant national
database of all criminal records that you can access. Now
I know that you are sure that I am crazy. “Why just
last night on Law & Order they got the bad guy’s
record . . .” There, you are talking about NCIC,
the National Crime Information Center or otherwise known as
the FBI files. While the FBI maintains the best and most
accurate records, unfortunately, you can’t get them,
unless of course you are a federally insured bank, a
defense department contractor, a nuclear power plant, a
branch of the government itself or some other such entity.
A surprising amount of otherwise intelligent people think
that there are giant government databases with information
on everyone including their criminal history, job history,
credit files an even what books they check out of the
library and what videos they rent. If that were true, why
does it take the government itself four months and $2400 to
conduct its own background checks? Don’t believe me?
Look here:
http://www.opm.gov/extra/investigate/FIN-2002/fin02-01Attach
1.asp
SURPRISING TRUTH # 3: There is a big, big difference
between everywhere and anywhere. The companies that sell
database information advertise that they search everywhere,
or at least that’s what they want you to believe.
Using the word Nationwide is designed to make you think
that they check everywhere. The question then becomes,
“If you don’t check everywhere, what do you
check?” The answer is that we check anywhere a
person has lived or worked. Does it really help to check a
database of Orange County, California if the person has
always lived and worked in Orange County, Florida or vice
versa?
So if there’s no such thing as an instant nationwide
database what are these companies selling? First let me
tell you what these databases are good for and then
I’ll tell you why they are dangerous. In some states
of the USA their REAL criminal records are available in
some kind of publicly accessible form. It may be on the
internet and it may require a subscription or
acknowledgement of permissible purpose for its use, but it
is available. Texas is a good example of this. For a
small fee you can go online and access the REAL criminal
records of the state of Texas. Florida, Minnesota and
Virginia are other examples of where you can get via these
database services what I call “REAL” records.
The problem is that these database companies don’t
tell the consumer (you) that is most cases and in most
areas of the country you are getting either nothing or
marginal information at best.
Here's why. The companies that collect and sell these
database records, and the hundreds of companies that
re-sell this information do not emphasize the weakness of
their systems. This is why they emphasize the words
“instant” and “nationwide” in their
promotions. Everyone wants cheap and instant as opposed to
slow and expensive, don’t they? Can you imagine a
website that advertises “Slow And Expensive Limited
Area Background Checks.” But, in fact, some areas of
the country, like the Carolinas and most of California
require exactly that, records that must be searched in
person at each local county courthouse.
These companies get records where they can get them for
free; usually from a state's Department of Corrections,
which means you are only getting info on a person if he/she
has been convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison.
When most people think of a criminal history background
check they think of all arrests and convictions; both
misdemeanors and felonies and the court disposition, guilty
or not guilty and the sentence. As you can see, if you are
getting only felony convictions, you are getting only a
small piece of the pie. For example; a person could be
arrested a couple of times for having drug paraphernalia or
a small amount of drugs in his or her possession. If the
records you are getting only include felony convictions,
you would have no record of that person’s drug abuse.
The other problem that these Instant Nationwide background
checks have is that in many areas of the country they get
nothing at all because the states or the county superior
courts or district courts don’t furnish them with
free records. Here is another example: Suppose you are a
parent in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Boston,
Atlanta or New Orleans (just to name a few) and you want to
do a criminal background check. You go online and type in
“background check” in Yahoo or Google and right
away you see the ads for the “Instant
Nationwide” background checks. You choose one of the
websites that offers instant records, you pay your $19.95
or $49.95 and you put in the information on the person you
want checked. Instantly the website tells you that there
is no record found based on the info that you have
provided. You feel great! You go ahead and tell the nanny
that she can start tomorrow because she has passed the
background check. Here comes the big kick in the gut. . .
What the website didn’t tell you is that their
database records don’t search any of those areas at
all. You just paid $19.95 or $49.95 and got NOTHING, ZERO,
ZIP, NADA. Disclosure: Actually the proceeding sentence is
not 100% true. In Nevada and Louisiana the databases do
search currently incarcerated prisoners in their respective
prison systems. So if your potential nanny is in prison
right now then it would tell you that he/she is in prison,
but I guess you would already know that.
Now to explain the # 1 Surprising Truth: I’ll say it
again: Anyone can check anyone, anytime. If you are so
inclined, you can check the criminal or civil record (or
lack thereof) of your daughter’s boyfriend (I do that
on a regular basis) your crazy neighbor next door, your
business partner, your doctor, your ex-husband, your mayor
or even any of the presidential candidates. In fact, you
don’t even have to be a citizen of the USA to get
these records. You can walk into the Superior Court
(District Court in some states) clerk’s office, in
the jurisdiction where that person lives/lived, go up to
the counter, fill out a slip of paper, hand it to the clerk
and wait for the results. Remember that you will only get
the records from that county, i.e., if a person lived in
multiple counties you would have to check each of them.
The subject of your search could be an axe murder from the
next county over, but your county court clerk would not
have a record of it.
OK, now you’ve got the information, what do you do
with it? This is the area where the law is concerned; what
you do with the information! If you use this information
to discriminate against a person, deny them employment,
housing or entrance to a school, etc. then you are
violating the law and opening yourself to big time
liabilities and possible lawsuits. This is what all of the
consent forms with warnings are all about. It’s not
the getting of the information that the laws are concerned
with but the use of it.
In summary, read the fine print and ask questions or go to
the courthouse and do it yourself.
----------------------------------------------------
Kit Fremin is the owner and founder of Background Check
International. Since 1994 BCI has served clients a varied
as: the LA Times, Department of Defense, Mars, Inc., the
UN, the NTSB and Calvary Chapels nationwide. His website
is: http://www.bcint.com and he can be e-mailed at
kit@bcint.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment