Low-cost criminal checks criticized
Some services called unreliable and incomplete
BY GREG BURNS
Chicago Tribune May 2004
Employers worried about crime, terrorism and liability are embracing a new breed of online services for screening job candidates, but these low-budget background checks don't always check out.
The cheapest ones routinely fail to identify criminals, performing such superficial reviews that serious offenders can get perfectly clean reports, critics say.
Even when these services uncover criminal records, the information often is incomplete and unreliable. And with instant checks costing as little as $10 apiece, the trampling of privacy rights and fair-hiring laws can become as simple as a point and a click, the critics say.
While the private background-check business has a few big players, hundreds of upstarts have emerged in recent years to cash in on the nation's heightened security concerns, said Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who has studied the booming industry.
Some 467 companies offer background checks on the Inter- net, Bushway said. And in at least some instances, they provide little more than false assurances to those vetting everyone from truck drivers to child-care providers.
"It's absolutely impossible to know who these companies are," he said. "They're not responsible to anybody about anything."
In conducting his research, Bushway obtained the criminal records of 120 current parolees in Virginia, then submitted their names to a popular online background check company -- he won't say which one.
Sixty names came back showing no criminal record at all, and many of the other reports were so scrambled their offenses scarcely could be identified, he said. "They look like different people."
The Chicago Tribune conducted a similar spot-check in March, submitting the names and birthdates of 10 Illinois offenders whose sentences were reported in the media for crimes ranging from drunk driving and fraud to possession of child pornography.
InstantPeopleCheck.com found no criminal records for any of them in its $9.95-per-person statewide search. It flagged one as a sex offender, based on his entry in the state's free online registry, but included no corresponding description of his guilty plea a year ago for soliciting a juvenile prostitute.
The service, chosen at random from the Internet, won't disclose the identity of its owners or employees, and lists its mailing address as a post office box in an Anchorage, Alaska, retail mall.
Through an unsigned e-mail, InstantPeopleCheck said its search fulfilled the criteria set forth on its Web site. Indeed, the company promised only a cursory check and disclosed that it couldn't guarantee the accuracy or extent of the results.
The risks of negligent hiring were demonstrated tragically in a case involving a Chicago native, Dr. Kerry Spooner-Dean, murdered in her California home by a carpet cleaner with a long criminal history.
The murderer went to prison, and Spooner-Dean's husband won an $11 million judgment in 2000 that put the carpet company out of business. The company performed no screening.
"The verdict sends a message," said Paul D. Scott, plaintiff's attorney in the case. "A background check would have helped."
The lesson is that even a sketchy check can reduce liability in such circumstances. As labor and employment attorney Gerald D. Skoning, a senior partner at Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago, put it, "They're definitely better than doing nothing. It's a cheap insurance policy."
That reality is small consolation to Spooner-Dean's mother, Mary Spooner of Grayslake, Ill., who in the wake of her daughter's death vowed to push for wider use of criminal background checks.
She quickly recognized that many businesses still were skeptical of the need for checks, or too eager to seize the cheapest option, she said. "Those $9.95ers," she lamented. "There's so many holes."
Still, even the simplest searches convey a sense of scope and timeliness that they rarely if ever possess, said Lynn Peterson, president of PFC Information Services Inc. research firm.
Some vendors, she noted, effectively check only for current inmates of state prisons. Their reports indicate "no record" even for those on probation or serving time in a county jail.
Peterson's company specializes in more extensive screenings that involve tracing the addresses and names used by a subject over the years, then hiring researchers known as "runners" to track down public records at each location. "You can do a darn decent background check for a couple of hundred dollars," she said.
A thorough screening almost always involves sending runners to the courthouses, noted John Long, chief executive of the publicly held First Advantage Corp., one of the largest background check services: "These instant searches as a general rule of thumb are a bunch of (nonsense)."