Employers wants to make good hiring decisions that will add value to their workforce and performance and this involves digging into a candidate’s background for the identity information required by law. Recently, commenting on the compliance procedures for employers, Chad Ascar, Director of Compliance Integrations at DISA, shone a light on the setbacks in background checks, where sometimes data seems to be ‘lost’ or unobtainable. The legislation in the U.S. must also be stringently followed to ascertain a candidate is eligible to work and reside in a particular state. In the U.S. the federal system means a litany of laws exist, which mirror the UK’s laws around the Right to Work and Right to Rent schemes.
For prospective workers the background checks are expected but for employers they may assume this data is easily accessible whilst confronted with “multiple factors” impacting the “accuracy and completeness of background checks”.
In the U.S. identity records which can give a picture of someone include name, Social Security number, date of birth, address, email address and driver licence number.
Laws are in place to determine whether a candidate has a criminal history, bankruptcies, no residence eligibility, for instance, which work in businesses favour. On the other hand, the Fair Credit Reporting Act is a federal law that governs background checks and prohibits data being retained, stored and shared by consumer reporting agencies. This validates a timeframe during which data is in date and can be used to consider someone’s employment.
One barrier firms may face when doing background checks is finding that data has been deleted after a certain time period, in relation to civil suits, debt, tax liens, bankruptcies and criminal convictions. State and local laws can overlay the federal framework providing slightly different restrictions on what background checks can include. In states such as California, Maryland, Kansas and Massachusetts non-conviction data must only be reported from the last 7 years whilst different states.
DISA’s takeaways advise US employers to understand the Fair Credit Reporting Act and data collection as part of other regulations, which could impact comprehensive background checks. Employers are responsible for making sure hiring policies and requests for information align with state and local requirements. The Ban the Box and Fair Chance Laws also empower a candidate with a criminal history to get fair interviews that demonstrate their rehabilitation and delay when they have to disclose past convictions. Ascar notes that some laws are more ethical and privacy-minded, “expunging” personal identifiers that exist on public systems and can match data to an individual.
