Criminal records missed in some background checks
By Greg Burns
Chicago Tribune
Employers worried about crime, terrorism and liability are embracing a new breed of online services for screening job candidates, but these low-budget background checks don't always check out.
The cheapest ones routinely fail to identify criminals, performing such superficial reviews that serious offenders can get perfectly clean reports, critics say.
Even when these services uncover criminal records, the information often is incomplete and unreliable. And with instant checks costing as little as $10 apiece, the trampling of privacy rights and fair-hiring laws can become as simple as a point and a click, the critics say.
While the private background-check business has a few big players, hundreds of upstarts have emerged in recent years to cash in on the nation's heightened security concerns, according to Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who has studied the booming industry.
Some 467 separate companies offer background checks on the Internet, Bushway said.
And in at least some instances, they provide little more than false assurances to those vetting potential employees ranging from truck drivers to childcare providers.
"It's absolutely impossible to know who these companies are," he said. "They're not responsible to anybody about anything."
In conducting his research, Bushway obtained the criminal records of 120 current parolees in the state of Virginia, then submitted their names to a popular online background-check company — he won't say which one.
Sixty came back showing no criminal record, and many of the other reports were so scrambled their offenses scarcely could be identified, he said. "They look like different people."
Company fails spot-check
The Chicago Tribune conducted a similar spot-check in March, submitting the names and birthdates of 10 Illinois offenders whose sentences were reported in the media for crimes ranging from drunken driving and fraud to possession of child pornography.
InstantPeopleCheck.com found no criminal records for any of them in its $9.95-per-person statewide search. It flagged one as a sex offender, based on his entry in the state's free online registry, but included no corresponding description of his guilty plea a year ago for soliciting a juvenile prostitute.
The service, which was chosen at random from the Internet, said through an unsigned e-mail that its search fulfilled the criteria set forth on its Web site. Indeed, the company promised only a cursory check and disclosed that it couldn't guarantee the accuracy or extent of the results.
Still, even the simplest searches convey a sense of scope and timeliness that they rarely if ever possess, said Lynn Peterson, president of the research firm PFC Information Services Inc.
Some vendors, she noted, effectively check only for current inmates of state prisons. Their reports indicate "no record" even for those on probation or serving time in a county jail.
Peterson's company specializes in more extensive screenings that involve tracing the addresses and names used by a subject over the years, then hiring researchers known as "runners" to track down public records at each location.
The privately owned InstantPeopleCheck.com offers more thorough and time-consuming searches that could have picked up the prior offenses of the criminals it failed to identify for $9.95, the company e-mails claimed.
Privacy rights debated
The boom in inexpensive online screenings is fueling a backlash among those who believe the privacy rights of workers are being compromised.
No one has established widely accepted guidelines for how the information should be used, labor advocates say. And so much data is available that some, inevitably, is inaccurate and misleading. "The incompleteness usually works to the detriment of the worker," said Mike Ingrao, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO's Transportation Trades Department.
At the same time that new rules requiring background checks for certain jobs are proliferating, existing law already imposes some stringent requirements on how those checks can be conducted.
The longstanding Fair Credit Reporting Act, for instance, requires employers to use up-to-date information for screening job candidates.
It also says the subjects must give their permission for a background review and receive copies of any records used in employment decisions.
The rise of quick online checks makes those rules tougher to enforce, according to the University of Maryland's Bushway.
Consequently, a job candidate might never get to explain, for example, that an arrest resulted in an acquittal, he said. "In most cases, you're not going to be hired, and you're not told why."
Performing background checks can leave companies open to allegations of discrimination or defamation. Yet failing to perform background checks can lead to liability for the acts of criminals on the payroll — so-called "negligent hiring and retention."
