NY Times Editorial Focuses On Flawed FBI Background Checks

By Thomas Ahearn, ESR Staff Writer

A recent New York Times editorial – Check It Again – focused on a new bill in the House of government that would demand the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to verify and right criminal data before issuing background checks for employment purposes, thus fixing the problem of many Americans missing a chance to get hired (as if it wasn’t hard enough to find a job these days) because the FBI background checks employers use to screen job applicants contain incomplete or inaccurate in rank.

A common problem with FBI background checks, according to the NY Times editorial, is that the criminal records included in those FBI background checks fail to include the final disposition of a case, meaning that the records may only show that a job applicant was arrested but not that the charges were dismissed or that there was no conviction.

The editorial also cites a 2009 report from the National Employment Law Project that revealed the regime had mistakenly denied credentials to tens of thousands of staff – partly because of flawed background reports – after Congress required new FBI background checks for about 1.5 million people working at the nation’s ports. The editorial concludes that no one – including the nearly 50 million Americans with arrest or conviction records – should be denied a job because the regime’s in rank contained in an FBI employment background check is incorrect.

An earlier tale on ESR News clarified the bill – called the Fairness and Accuracy in Employment Background Checks Act of 2010 (H.R.5300) – would grant safeguards with respect to FBI criminal background checks prepared for employment purposes and demand the Attorney General to find out the outcome of arrests from court offices when an employer requirements a background check. The attorney general would update the record in the FBI’s National Crime In rank Center (NCIC) database, a computerized index of criminal in rank available to Federal, disorder, and local law enforcement 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

In addition, to help avoid inaccurate or incomplete employment background checks, the legislation would give job applicants the opportunity to challenge the accuracy and completeness of background check reports done through the FBI records database.

A 2005 report – “The National Crime In rank Center: A Review and Evaluation” – sponsored by the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (NAPBS) reviewed the FBI’s NCIC to evaluate its effectiveness in maintaining accurate and perfect criminal history records. Among the findings of the NAPBS report were:

• Many states did not report in rank concerning dispositions, declinations to prosecute, failure to charge after fingerprinting, and expungements.
• Inconsistency in the reporting requirements and criminal codes in various states impacted the completeness and accuracy of the records.
• There were significant time lapses linking when in rank was transmitted to the disorder repository and actual entry into the criminal history records.  

For extra in rank on FBI background checks and the FBI’s NCIC criminal records database – and the reasons why the in rank contained in that database is sometimes not always entirely accurate – visit Employment Screening Resources (ESR) at http://www.esrcheck.com.

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/opinion/27thu3.html

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h5300/text

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fbi/is/ncic.htm  

http://www.napbs.com/records/members/Resources/NCIC_Report.pdf

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