To print article, click Print on your browser's File menu. Go back   Monitor your credit How to read your credit report Test your credit knowledge Liz Pulliam Weston's reading list Find It! Article Index Fast Answers Tools Index Site Map Recent articles by Liz Pulliam Weston: • Is your degree worth $1 million -- or worthless?, 8/13/2005 • How should I pay for home repairs?, 8/10/2005 • What happens if my tax cheat gets caught?, 8/7/2005 More...		The Basics Is your boss spying on you? For a fee, specialized companies will report any brush you have with the law -- and your employer can fire you with virtually no consequences.  By Liz Pulliam Weston Think of it as the background check that never ends. Instead of just reviewing your criminal history once before offering you a job, your employer now can monitor you 24/7. Verified Person, a company founded by former Apple Computer CEO John Sculley, has unveiled a criminal database that will notify employers of any misstep by workers, even after they've been hired. Verified Person touts the service as an essential tool to help employers reduce fraud, theft, workplace violence and other ills. For as little as $1 per employee per month, the company will scan the county-level databases where most criminal records appear and report whatever level of infractions the employer specifies, from major violent felonies down to misdemeanors or simply any arrests. About 100 employers, with work forces ranging from 80 employees to 60,000, have signed up so far. Find a loan that's right for you at the Loan Center In many cases, employers can fire workers based on what they find. Most employees in the U.S. are "at will," which means their company can fire them for virtually any reason, or no reason at all. What's more, thanks to a 2003 change in federal law, some key protections afforded by law to you in a pre-employment background check aren't required of post-hire investigations: Employers don't have to notify you in advance. Employers don't have to get your written consent. Employers don't have to give you a copy of the report made on you, or tell you which company supplied it (although they do have to give you a general idea of what the report said). Your employer doesn't need any reason to suspect you of misconduct to set the background bloodhounds on your trail. Related news and commentary on MSN Money • Secrets you can keep from an employer • Does your boss want you dead? • 10 ways to stop identity theft cold • How bad credit can cost you a job • On the Web? Your boss may be watching Reputations are hard to repair Am I the only one feeling a chill here? Apparently not. The idea of continuous computerized background checks upsets a lot of privacy and workers rights groups. While this innovation may give employers the sense that they're reducing workplace problems, it also leaves employees vulnerable to unfair firing or to being denied promotion over petty offenses and troubles that may have no bearing on their job performance -- if the information is even accurate. Anyone who's dealt with an error on a credit report has a sense of how big databases can be, simply put, wrong. "We get quite a number of complaints about background-check problems," said Beth Givens, head of San Diego's Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. "We've talked to people whose lives have been destroyed, literally, by erroneous records and criminal identity theft." Kimberly Chamberlain of Jacksonville Beach, Fla., said she's a victim of the latter. A relative who was arrested in four states used Chamberlain's maiden name and driver's license number instead of her own. Over time, Chamberlain said, she's learned how to deal with the false arrest warrants. But she wasn't prepared earlier this year when her new boss and a human resources representative confronted her about "her" criminal past. Chamberlain had started the job as a budget analyst only a few days before. She said she tried to tell the human-resources rep about the identity theft, but "I couldn't get a word in edgewise." Chamberlain believes she would have been fired on the spot if her boss hadn't intervened and suggested Chamberlain be allowed to bring in documents the next day proving her innocence. Chamberlain did, but the damage had been done. Several of Chamberlain's subordinates had seen her being marched into the office, and Chamberlain said she relived the ugly encounter every time she saw the human-resources rep in the hallway, which was frequently. Chamberlain wound up quitting the job a few days later and went to work for a shipping company. "I lost credibility. I was so traumatized," Chamberlain said. "I felt violated." And she wonders how someone less prepared would have fared. Chamberlain had paperwork from police departments documenting the identity theft. If she hadn't known about the theft until the confrontation at work, she said, she might not have been able to respond in time to avoid being fired. Hold employers and screeners to a high standard Verified Person didnt perform the background check on Chamberlain, but its CEO, Tal Moise, said the company advises its clients to give employees an opportunity to prove their innocence before acting on a report. If Verified Persons finds a client firing employees precipitously, we will discontinue services," Moise said. "That's not a client we want -- but we cannot become the judge and jury of whether identity theft has occurred and when it hasn't." Moise said Verified Person goes well beyond the law's requirements by insisting its client companies draft policies spelling out what infractions can lead to firing and inform their employees about the ongoing monitoring. Of course, Verified Person's future competitors -- and if this continuous-screening model is successful, there are bound to be some -- might not be so picky. Meanwhile, many American employers are already going overboard in their efforts to purge their workplaces of people with criminal records, said Jeremy Gruber, legal director of the National Workrights Institute. Gruber cited cases of a company firing one worker for bouncing a $60 check and another for a misdemeanor assault conviction that carried a $27 fine. "Really, since 9/11, the practice of using criminal records has really exploded among employers," Gruber said. "Many employers have instituted absolute no-hire policies on people with criminal backgrounds" -- even though several states have banned such blanket policies, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has said such bans have a disparate impact on minorities. Since 43 million Americans have been convicted of a crime at some point in their lives, Gruber said, the issue isn't a small one. It's tempting to feel that the ends justify the means: that some wrongful terminations might be the price we have to pay if such screening can catch a child molester working at a day care, say, or a violent sociopath in the next cubicle. But I don't think we should have to choose. If this technology is available, we need to hold its purveyors to high standards of accuracy, punish employers who use the information capriciously and ensure that workers have ample opportunity to defend themselves. Liz Pulliam Westons newsletter Get the latest from Liz Pulliam Weston. Sign up to receive her free weekly newsletter. Your e-mail address:   Learn more about newsletters   Dont wait for a surprise If you're concerned, consider the following: Do a background check or two on yourself. That's how Ron C. Peterson of Illinois discovered that a couple of employment-screening companies had confused him with a Ron D. Peterson, residence unknown, who has a criminal record. The crime-free Peterson managed to get those two companies to clear up their records, but the telecommunications technician suspects similar confusion at other screening companies are contributing to his long-term unemployment. You can use one of the big companies, like ChoicePoint, to conduct your self-screening, or just put the words "employment screening" or "background check" into a search engine to find companies who'll do this for about $30. Hopefully, the information you'll find will be benign. If it's not, you'll at least have a head start on trying to deal with any problems. Write your congressperson. Employers should have to prove a real connection between workers' crime and their jobs before firing people. We also need to amend the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003. This update of the Fair Credit Reporting Act created "safe harbors" for employers conducting post-hire investigations and effectively removed some important employee protections. You should have the right to see any report a background-check firm supplies about you and have time to refute inaccuracies before your job is affected. Employers should be liable if they act precipitously on information that later proves to be false. At the very least, the workers jobs should be restored -- even if their good names can't be. After all, "A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired," English satirist Joseph Hall said, "but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was." Liz Pulliam Weston's column appears every Monday and Thursday, exclusively on MSN Money. She also answers reader questions in the Your Money message board.
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