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| The Basics | Is your boss spying on you?
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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.
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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MSN Money's editorial goal is to provide a forum for personal finance and investment ideas. Our articles, columns, message board posts and other features should not be construed as investment advice, nor does their appearance imply an endorsement by Microsoft of any specific security or trading strategy. An investor's best course of action must be based on individual circumstances.
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