Why $10 Background Checks Are Bad For Your Business

A $10, or less, background check is typically a National Criminal File check. However, this is simply a database of scraped records that come from counties that have electronic records that are publicly available online.

These services will also include information from other, valuable sources too, including sex offender registries, terrorist watchlists, and other financial sanction databases.

This is not in any way a “federal” government database. It is typically just a collection of data that a private business aggregates and sells to background check companies for them to resell to end employers.

These checks are often missing large parts of the United States, including counties around urban areas.

So, if you run these checks, you will be potentially excluding substantial areas where crimes may have been committed. This is why you always want to run a background check in counties a candidate has lived in during the past 7 years.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires strict procedures to confirm the accuracy of a background check.

One of the most litigious areas of background checks is reporting inaccurate information on an individual that leads to them not getting a position. If your background check company is simply reporting information from a database without verifying the information at a county level, they may not be following strict procedures.

We strongly recommend that at a minimum, you advise your background check firm to verify any records found at the county level. However, this is where many background check companies pull a “bait & switch”.

This means they then charge you additional fees to check the county and that county may have access fees of their own. And those counties may also take several days to return the original records.

Unfortunately, there is no $10 background check solution that is comprehensive enough and compliant to meet employers’ needs.

While you may have to pay more and wait longer, the total cost of talent acquisition is still lower than making a bad hire or exposing yourself to litigation risk.