Yep, Costco has agreed to pay nearly $2.5 million to end a Fair Credit Reporting Act class action lawsuit alleging the company failed to use proper stand-alone disclosure notices to obtain background reports about job applicants. But, guess who gets their money first? After covering the Class’s court costs and attorneys’ fees and incentive awards […]

Criminal background and job performance are related? Three authors attempted to examine the issue. In their Abstract   the authors state “for Job applicants with criminal records are much less likely than others to obtain legitimate employment.” Recent efforts to address this problem include campaigns to persuade employers to hire ex-offenders voluntarily and legislation such […]

Calling prior employers makes sense for a number of reasons. Often we hear the question “Why call prior employers? All we get is name and employment dates. Let’s review some good reasons to verify In general, we believe people will behave for their current employer, maybe your firm, as they have behaved in the past […]

Some clients send their employees to work on their client’s premises. This happens most frequently with defense contractors who send their employees to government agencies. Typically, the government agency will be able to do a fingerprint record search. Then, our clients are told they have to remove their employee because the FBI fingerprint record search […]

What effect does recidivism have on your background check policy? First let’s define recidivism. Recidivism is the likelihood that someone who broke the law and was convicted once, will do it again after being set free. When you are hiring someone for your firm, you want to be as sure as possible that the individual […]