Security personnel rely on background screening for new hires
Without a national database from which to retrieve information, and with no such system likely to be put in place any time soon, security and human resources personnel are relying on background screeners and their network of researchers to comb court documents and determine whether potential employees meet a company's hiring criteria. Read more

Who is checking the background checkers?
Some 80 percent of employers now require background checks for all potential employees, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC), a consumer rights advocacy group in San Diego…. But what if a background check is in error? Read more

Day Care Background Checks in Backlog
After pre-schools and daycares hire teachers, they have to pass a background check if they're going to stay on the job. The process is supposed to be quick so that teachers with trouble in their past can be fired before they do any more damage. But the state agency handling the background checks is badly backlogged. The result is long delays. Read more

Football camps didn't check most workers
Six employees of the University of Colorado's youth football camp had criminal records that weren't discovered until after the camps had occurred - including one convicted of misdemeanor child abuse, according to a state audit released Monday.Read more

Church requiring background check for all personnel
When the New Year arrives, every member of the staff at the United Methodist Church of La Mirada and every Sunday School teacher, counselor and volunteer will have undergone a background check. It's just one of the policies instituted by the La Mirada church and all of the United Methodist churches in Southern California, Guam, Hawaii and Saipan as part of an effort to stem any sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church from occurring in United Methodist churches. Read more

Online Screening Saves Time and Money.
User-friendly tests and carefully thought-out assessments can help you find better candidates faster. Technology can’t make your hiring decisions for you, but effective online programs can add efficiency to your screening and candidate assessment processes. Used properly, these programs are particularly good at the early step of weeding out unqualified candidates. Read more

Private Schools May Check Workers - Lawmakers are considering plan for background inquiries.
High school referees, vending machine deliverymen and plumbers have to undergo extensive criminal background checks now under a new sex offender law if they do their work on public school property. Read more

Employment Screening – Justifying the Expense
Measuring cost per denial is an effective method of calculating the ROI of a company’s employment screening program.Read more.

Technology's Impact on Background Screening
Technology advances continue to impact the way we conduct business and are having a profound effect on the background screening industry. Advances in integrating information systems are creating the capability to access business information easily through one source, which is transforming background screening systems that have historically been standalone feeds.Read more.

Study Finds FBI Criminal Database Search Ineffective for Employment Background Checks
August 26, 7:45 am ET

DURHAM, N.C., Aug. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- As US employers increasingly utilize criminal background checks in their hiring process, the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (NAPBS) has identified one source of information that employers should avoid: the FBI Criminal Database.

In reaction to recent proposed federal legislation that would allow employers direct access to the FBI's database, NAPBS commissioned a study to evaluate the accuracy and completeness of this FBI criminal search.

The results were shocking.

The study found that in a significant percentage of searches, the FBI database returned erroneous or incomplete information.

The study, conducted by Craig N. Winston, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Sonoma State University, found that the FBI data lacks proper identifiers to credibly link a criminal hit with the subject of the investigation.

Another finding was the large number of missed records and false positives generated. For example, when analyzing a sampling of 93,274 background checks in the state of Florida, Winston's search revealed that the database missed 11.7 percent of the criminal records it should have identified. Even worse - of the more than 10,000 criminal records found, 5.5 percent of them were falsely attributed to those who were not convicted of a crime.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) compels employers to use the most up- to-date and accurate information when screening applicants for employment.

NAPBS co-chair Jason B. Morris says, "If employers are granted access to the FBI's data, they can easily be lulled into the false sense of security that they are availing themselves of the most accurate and comprehensive search available. As a result, they could be opening themselves to increased risk in the workplace and litigation from wronged job applicants."

Results from this comprehensive study can be found at http://www.napbs.com.

Founded as a non-profit trade association in 2003, the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (NAPBS) was established to promote ethical business practices, promote compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act and foster awareness of issues related to consumer protection and privacy rights within the background screening industry.

Media Contact: Tracy Seabrook NAPBS 919.433.0123 info@napbs.com

Pre-Employment Screening Articles

Background checks could have problems
More and more employers require employee background checks, which is why it's no surprise more and more private companies are popping up offering to provide them. A Target Five Investigation shows it can be risky business. A bad background check nearly cost Eric Williams a job. Read more.

Protect Your Organization Against Negligent Hiring Suits
Speaking to a packed house June 20 during his session at the SHRM Annual Conference and Exposition, Nadell said that nothing takes the place of thorough applicant background checking. However, no background checking process is foolproof, so it's crucial for companies to know how to obtain the most accurate information while remaining compliant with the myriad federal and state laws that regulate the industry. Read more.

Cape writer's family sues over death
$10m filing names murder defendant and his employer
By Ralph Ranalli, Globe Staff - May 18, 2005

The family of slain Truro writer Christa Worthington has filed a $10 million wrongful death lawsuit against her alleged killer and the Cape Cod trash-hauling business that employed him at the time of the slaying, lawyers said yesterday.

Christopher M. McCowen, 33, was arrested last month and charged with Worthington's rape and murder after a DNA sample he gave voluntarily was matched to evidence found at the crime scene. At the time, McCowen was working as a hauler for the Cape Cod Disposal Co. , and made weekly visits to Worthington's Depot Road home to pick up her garbage.

In a lawsuit made public yesterday, a lawyer for Worthington's estate made a $10 million wrongful death claim against both McCowen and CCDC Equipment Services, Cape Cod Disposal's parent company, alleging that both were culpable in her death.

The lawsuit charges that Worthington suffered ''great pain of body and anguish of mind" at McCowen's hands and that Cape Cod Disposal ''had an obligation to use reasonable care in selecting and retaining its employees to be sent to the homes of its customers."

The company, the lawsuit alleges, failed to use reasonable care in hiring McCowen, ''who had a history of criminal and violent behavior including but not limited to burglary, grand theft, trafficking in stolen property, felony assault, and threats to women which resulted in the issuance of restraining orders."

By hiring McCowen, the company put him in a position to familiarize himself with Worthington's home and routine, the lawsuit contends.

Weymouth lawyer Chester Tennyson Jr. confirmed yesterday that he filed the lawsuit earlier this month on behalf of Worthington's estate, which is administered by her father, Christopher Worthington, and BankNorth. Worthington's daughter, Ava, who was 2 years old at the time of the killing and was found clinging to her mother's lifeless body, is a beneficiary of the estate.
Tennyson said he would have no comment on the Barnstable Superior Court lawsuit and that he had asked Worthington's relatives to refrain from talking, as well.

''We'll do our only talking in the courtroom," he said.

Francis O'Boy, McCowen's Taunton-based lawyer, also declined to comment on the lawsuit yesterday. A lawyer for Cape Cod Disposal, however, said that the company admits no liability and plans to aggressively defend itself in the lawsuit.

''First of all, it has to be proven that he [McCowen] committed the act he is accused of committing," lawyer Bruce Bierhans said. ''Then the family has to prove that my client could not only have foreseen the crime, but could also have prevented it. Under Massachusetts law, the family has a very substantial burden of proof."

''This is not a nursing home or a day-care center; they are hiring people to pick up garbage," Bierhans said. ''We believe, and it will be our position in court that Cape Cod Disposal was fully in compliance with all of their obligations under the law."

In the criminal case, a state judge yesterday rejected O'Boy's petition that McCowen be released on $50,000 cash bail and ordered him to remain in jail pending trial.

According to recently unsealed court documents, McCowen insisted to police last year that he did not kill Worthington.

State Police investigators interviewed McCowen twice, once three months after the January 2002 slaying and again two years later. After the second interview, McCowen volunteered to have a sample of his DNA taken by swab. That sample was matched last month to DNA taken from Worthington's body, according to court documents made public yesterday.

According to the affidavit, McCowen said he had limited contact with Worthington; although he went to her house every Thursday, he said he did not know her and never went inside.

''Chris McCowen stated that Christa Worthington would occasionally watch him from inside her home through the front door and would sometimes wave," Trooper Christopher S. Mason wrote of the 2002 interview in an affidavit filed two months ago in support of the murder charges against McCowen.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Pre-Employment Screening Articles

Employers Win Most Drug Testing Cases
David Shadovitz, Human Resource Executive

A new book released by the Institute for a Drug Free Workplace in Washington reveals that employers are winning most drug testing related court battles. Employers prevailed in roughly two-thirds of the nearly 1,200 legal decisions on drug testing, according to the book, 2004-2005 Guide to State and Federal Drug Testing Laws.

In the last year,” says Gina M. Petro, counsel to the institute and a co-author of the guide, “87 court decisions upheld drug testing, and 46 did not.” Since the group began tracking suits in the mid-1980’s, employers prevailed in 825 cases, while challenges have been successful in only 374 cases. The numbers are somewhat higher for federal court cases, in which employers have prevailed 76 percent of the time.


Criminal background checks incomplete How convicted felons can slip through safety net
By Bob Sullivan, Technology correspondent, MSNBC
Updated: 5:06 p.m. ET April 12, 2005

Is there a felon in the next cubicle? What about in your child's afterschool athletic league?
Employers and volunteer organizations are increasingly turning to national commercial database searches provided by private firms to ferret out potential convicts from their ranks. The searches are quick, inexpensive, and promise nationwide coverage -- in theory, preventing convicted felons from moving away from a checkered past.

But experts say the nationwide tallies are often full of holes, and contain as few as 70 percent of all felony conviction records, leading in turn to a false sense of security. Read article at MSNBC.

LexisNexis: Files May Have Been Breached
LexisNexis Says Thieves May Have Breached Computer Files Containing Information of 310,000 People

Criminals may have breached computer files containing the personal information of 310,000 people, a tenfold increase over a previous estimate of how much data was stolen from information broker LexisNexis, the company's parent said Tuesday.
Last month, London-based publisher and data broker Reed Elsevier Group PLC said criminals may have accessed personal details of 32,000 people via a breach of its recently acquired Seisint unit, part of Dayton, Ohio-based LexisNexis. LexisNexis is a Reed subsidiary.
Reed said it identified 59 instances since January 2003 in which identifying information such as Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers may have been fraudulently acquired on thousands of people. Read article…

Pre-Employment Screening Articles

The Importance of a Complete Background Check
Criminals are learning that the primary identifier in court records is date of birth and that they can conceal their past by providing a false DOB. In his new book “Sleuthing 101, Background Checks and The Law,” Barry J. Nadell, President of InfoLink advises employers to always conduct a motor vehicle report as part of their background screening program… even if the job position does not include driving. Read more…

Lack of Background Check Leads to Liability
Blair v. Defender Services Inc., 4th Cir., No. 03-1280, Oct. 25, 2004. A college student was allowed to pursue her claims for negligent hiring and retention against a janitorial staffing service after allegedly being attacked by an employee of that service, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has held. Read more…

Bad Data Fouls Background ChecksWhile recent news has folks concerned about identity theft, inaccurate data is just as big a danger -- and individuals are left to police the problem themselves. Read more…

Hiring Presents Tricky Areas for Employers
A welter of federal and state laws and legal decisions — and fears of lawsuits — have put tight constraints on what information you can ask someone you're considering for a job, or what information you can give about a former employee. Read more…

Banking body lists security breaches amid data fears
Amid growing concern about identity theft, a US banking regulator on Thursday detailed several instances of security breaches at banks and previewed new guidelines on when banks must tell the customers about such lapses. Amy Friend, assistant chief counsel at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said that in one instance, the agency “directed a large bank to improve its employee screening policies” after determining that the bank had “inadvertently permitted a convicted felon, who engaged in identity theft-related crimes” to become an employee.

Did ChoicePoint End Run Backfire?
By Joseph Menn, LA Times, March 13, 2005

The data-collecting company has managed to avoid being bogged down by regulations -- until maybe now.

ALPHARETTA, Ga. — ChoicePoint Inc. was created to avoid just the sort of mess in which it now finds itself.

The nation's biggest private collector of personal information was spun off seven years ago from credit bureau Equifax Inc. largely to get around laws restricting the way such bureaus sell data.

Because it was not considered a financial services company, ChoicePoint was not subject to data laws, and for years the plan worked like a charm.

Freed from regulation, the company saw sales more than double — and its profit and stock price more than quadruple — as businesses demanded more data to manage risks and target marketing. ChoicePoint became the quintessential Information Age company, culling all manner of sensitive facts and figures about virtually every adult in the United States, some 19 billion records in all.

But in the wake of a security breach that allowed a ring of identity thieves to peruse tens of thousands of those records, ChoicePoint suddenly faces the sort of government oversight that it and similar companies have sought to avoid.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators are investigating ChoicePoint's practices. Last week, the Senate Banking Committee held the first in a series of congressional hearings. Legislators and industry experts predict new regulation of ChoicePoint and competing information brokers that compile and sell Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers and financial histories to tens of thousands of customers, including lenders, landlords and many of the Fortune 500.

"It's very unfortunate," said former ChoicePoint Vice President Catherine Aldrich. "They are a victim of a really heinous crime, and they are going to be really penalized — the whole industry is."

Privacy advocates disagree, saying ChoicePoint brought the prospect of more vigorous regulation on itself with an aggressive push to find new customers. They note that the recent breach was only the most widely publicized and that ChoicePoint has erred before — as during the 2000 election, when it was hired by the state of Florida to run background checks on voters.

Chief Executive Derek V. Smith and other company officers declined repeated interview requests, as did company directors.

In regulatory filings and news releases, though, the company has said it is cracking down on potential identity thieves by turning away some customers, giving up a projected $15 million to $20 million in annual revenue. Last year, the company posted profit of $148 million on sales of $919 million.

In a statement to Congress last week, ChoicePoint said it could live with some measure of new regulation. In the past, information brokers have offered support for legislation and then succeeded in watering it down, according to a new book on the industry, "No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society" by Robert O'Harrow Jr.

Information Raid

The latest problems erupted when con artists posing as small-business owners looked up sensitive information on 145,000 individuals.

ChoicePoint then made several missteps. Forced to notify California consumers under a law that took effect in 2003, ChoicePoint initially said only 35,000 state residents were at risk. Only later did it acknowledge the national scope of the breach. After that, CEO Smith said the incident was the first of its kind. But The Times soon discovered that, in fact, a similar episode had occurred in 2002.

Meanwhile, ChoicePoint still hasn't checked for people who might have been victimized before the California law went into effect.

All in all, ChoicePoint's handling of the affair has only added to the chorus calling for tighter regulation.

"They probably were too cavalier about it," said analyst Brandt Sakakeeny of Deutsche Bank Securities. "They didn't expect the firestorm that they've got."

That might be because despite all the company's knowledge about the people in its databases, ChoicePoint has few direct dealings with them.

The same isn't true of Equifax, Experian Ltd. and Trans Union Corp., which must address errors in the credit reports they compile. Although ChoicePoint resells information from the three bureaus, it doesn't have to take responsibility for the content.

That legal loophole, which Congress may soon shut, has been a tremendous boon to ChoicePoint. And the company has benefited from the wording in other laws as well. Financial institutions, including banks and other lenders, face much more onerous regulation about what they can do with customer data. ChoicePoint says it doesn't meet the definition of a financial institution.

"There are a lot of dark crevices in the law that need to be opened up and filled in," said Daniel Solove, author of "The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age."

ChoicePoint has flourished by exploiting such regulatory weak spots, even in insurance services, its oldest and most profitable line of business. The company keeps a database of insurance claims by holders of auto and homeowner policies. Insurers submit those records to the database and check new applicants against it.

State Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) and other critics say that consumers often don't know the database has been tapped or what's in it; that the files can include errors that go uncorrected; and that insurers even count simple inquiries that don't lead to the filing of a claim as a strike against policyholders.

Speier, who pushed a 2003 bill that would have curtailed the practice, maintains that insurers sometimes use the information to discriminate against customers. The state Insurance Department says one insurer, for example, refused to cover a San Francisco homeowner who had once asked her agent if she was covered for a clogged pipe.

Data and More Data

More frequent targets for critics have been ChoicePoint acquisitions that specialize in collecting widely dispersed public records, including legal judgments, liens and voter registration information, and then tying them to more sensitive data such as Social Security numbers and driver's licenses.

ChoicePoint bought Santa Ana-based CDB Infotek in 1996, shortly before spinning off from Equifax, and added Database Technologies Inc. in 2000. The next year, Database Technologies came under fire for having given Florida election officials a list of thousands of suspected felons that state officials used to bar people from voting.

The list was riddled with errors, and many of the accused were black Democrats. At least 1,000 people were improperly kept from voting, more than George W. Bush's margin of victory. The NAACP sued. ChoicePoint blamed Florida officials for asking for near-matches without making confirmation checks on their own. ChoicePoint settled the case in 2002 and agreed to reprocess its list of suspected ex-cons.

Although ChoicePoint's government deals generate only about 10% of revenue, Sakakeeny said, the company made the area a top priority after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the firm won a four-year, $67-million contract with the Justice Department. Local police, the FBI and other agencies are big customers, in part because laws prevent the authorities from keeping close tabs on those who aren't suspected of a crime.

"These government agencies are increasingly outsourcing various law enforcement and intelligence functions," Solove said. In a sense, he added, the government doesn't even need its own surveillance program. "It can achieve the same goal by having these companies do the work for them."

Yet ChoicePoint's government work has brought criticism from civil liberties groups.

"Individuals need to give their information to third parties in order to participate in society," Chris Hoofnagle, an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, wrote in a law journal last year. "It is unfair to cede all individuals' rights to a company that can simply hand over personal information to law enforcement."

Several foreign governments also launched investigations after ChoicePoint acquired secret information on their citizens. Mexico placed three accused middlemen under house arrest for their suspected roles in helping ChoicePoint buy the entire country's voting rolls, which are protected under federal law.

Despite the backlash, ChoicePoint has indicated that it wants to go much further in mining for information. The company has been working on a secret database prototype for the FBI. And Smith, the CEO, has pressed for the expansion of DNA collection from criminals and others, as well as for parents to take DNA samples from their children.

"In the near future, identity, so weakened by fallible representations like birth dates and Social Security numbers, will be anchored by infallible genetic markers," Smith wrote in his 2004 book "Risk Revolution."

Although such sentiments have alarmed privacy advocates, ChoicePoint has taken the most flak for the way it peddles far more workaday information.

The Nigerian fraud rings that repeatedly penetrated ChoicePoint's databases passed themselves off as legitimate small companies interested in tapping people's addresses, phone listings, Social Security numbers and credit reports.

The company stresses that it doesn't grant access to information to just anybody. But it has opened its arms much wider in recent years.

Backgrounds Exposed

The clearest case is a product called Employee Background Check, which was sold in 2003 to the general public at Sam's Club stores for less than $40. ( ChoicePoint's lead outside director, Thomas Coughlin, recently retired as vice chairman of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., where he oversaw the U.S. operations of Sam's Club.) The kit, since pulled from the market, featured many of ChoicePoint's databases and allowed customers armed with someone else's Social Security number to look up identifying information and possible criminal records.

Ostensibly aimed at employers, the product did little to weed out nosy neighbors or crooks.

The package came with a seal reading "Business License Required." But the online registration forms, which took less than half an hour to complete, didn't ask users to submit a license number, according to Pam Dixon, founder of nonprofit research group World Privacy Forum.

And though users were supposed to have the approval of purported job candidates for some searches, all ChoicePoint demanded was that customers check an electronic box marked "candidate authorization obtained?"

The company told users they might be audited, but Dixon said she bought a kit and never got so much as a phone call asking who she was.

"It was the single most insecure background check product I have ever seen in my life," she said.

In some eyes, the Sam's Club sales exemplified ChoicePoint's drive to trade wider access to its information for greater revenue.

"The public records side had really stagnated," said Aldrich, the former vice president, who now works at an employee-screening firm. Even so, she called the kit decision "a really odd thing."

CEO Smith has called for a broad discussion of how the increased flow of information can be used for good and ill.

"The electronic 'pipeline' is not the problem," he wrote. "The problem is society's continuing delay in implementing consistent, coherent standards and guidelines to monitor and protect the flow."

But by putting profit above all else, some analysts say, Smith has lost his shot at driving that conversation.

"They should have taken a stronger leadership role on the process, in who they disclose to," said Gartner Inc. financial security analyst Avivah Litan. "Companies like ChoicePoint can't see the forest for the trees."

*
Times staff writer David Colker and researchers John Tyrrell and Penny Love contributed to this report.

ChoicePoint Inc. said Tuesday, February 15 that it began sending letters to 35,000 California residents to tell them that their personal information may have been compromised by a fraud ring that obtained credit reports, Social Security numbers and other information on as many as 100,000 victims nationwide in a massive case of identity theft.

Fraud Ring Taps Into Credit Data
L.A. Times

Data theft case widens; 750 fraud victims found
MSNBC

Californians warned that hackers may have stolen their data
USA Today

More Than 70 Percent of HR Professionals Say Reference Checking is Effective in Identifying Poor Performers

(Alexandria, Va., February 3, 2005)—Nearly 40 percent of HR professionals report that over the last three years they have increased the amount of time spent on reference checking for potential employees, according to the 2005 Reference Checking Survey released by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM.)

Most organizations conduct reference and background checks as part of their screening process. Seventy-three percent of survey respondents say that reference checking is somewhat or very effective in identifying poor performers.

“Being able to identify unqualified candidates during the recruiting process saves organizations time and money,” said Susan R. Meisinger, SPHR, president and CEO of SHRM. “Employees provide the competitive edge for a successful business, making it critically important for organizations to be able to recruit the right people. With new technologies, reference and background checking has become easier to conduct and increasingly more important to organizations who want to get a complete picture of the job candidates they consider hiring.”

Ninety-six percent of organizations conduct some kind of background or reference check. Although much reference checking is conducted in-house, 52 percent of survey respondents report that their organization outsources at least part of their reference checking or verification.

Survey respondents report that reference checks have found inconsistencies in areas including certifications, eligibility to work in the United States, degrees conferred, schools attended, and malpractice or professional disciplinary action. The most common inconsistencies - found by about half of survey respondents - are inconsistencies in dates of previous employment, criminal records, former job titles, and past salaries.

Organizations are responsible for checking the references of potential employees, but also are asked to provide reference information about former employees. Due to a fear of liability, 54 percent of organizations have policies to not provide employee references. Yet, 75 percent of HR professionals believe their organization would share more information about current and former employees if there were laws clearly protecting them from legal liability.

The survey was based on 345 responses from a random sample of SHRM members.

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The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is the world’s largest association devoted to human resource management. Representing more than 190,000 individual members, the Society's mission is to serve the needs of HR professionals by providing the most essential and comprehensive resources available. As an influential voice, the Society's mission is also to advance the human resource profession to ensure that HR is recognized as an essential partner in developing and executing organizational strategy. Founded in 1948, SHRM currently has more than 500 affiliated chapters and members in more than 100 countries. Visit SHRM Online at www.shrm.org