How Did a Criminal Background Check Miss That?
A colleague recently called and said that he had received a telephone call from an anonymous source telling him that one of his recently hired employees was a convicted felon and had served at least ten years in prison for robbery. The caller offered no further information, but was adamant that the information was correct.
In my colleague’s business, all new hires are subjected to a criminal background check that consists of a “standard” 7-year county criminal search, and the check had turned up nothing. He wanted to know if this was possible.
It sure is possible, and there a number of reasons how this could occur. The first clue is that the informant said the employee had spent ten years in prison, so that if the check only goes back seven years, then the conviction wouldn’t be found. Next, the employee might have been incarcerated in a totally different jurisdiction or state. An address history or social trace would have revealed addresses used by the employee, and additional jurisdictions could have been searched.
Yet another possibility was that the employee had been convicted and sentenced in federal court and served the sentence in a federal penitentiary.
Another red flag might have been raised by an employment verification. If a person is serving time, it is difficult to legitimately name former employers, so that verifying previous employment is definitely a means to uncover false claims and to cause further investigation.
When most people think of those who are tried for violating federal crimes they picture hardened felons serving long sentences. There are plenty of lesser crimes that fall into this category, and result in fines or probation only. I once saw a background check on an individual who had been cited for littering in a national park and was fined in federal court.
As it turns out, my colleague’s employee had recently been released from prison in an adjoining state, where he had indeed served ten years after being convicted of several violent offenses.
The original criminal background check did in fact “miss” the conviction because its scope had been too narrow.
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