Background checks growing

STAMFORD, Conn. — Jessica Smith thought she was a shoo-in for a cashier’s job at an Office Depot in Minnesota last summer. The store manager was encouraging, saying he just needed to run a criminal background check.

But a week later, Smith received a rejection letter that cited a lengthy rap sheet, including drug convictions in Washington.

“I have no record,” Smith, 19, said as she flipped through court documents. “They all say felony and guilty. I’ve never even been to Washington.”

Smith, who fought for six weeks to clear her name before eventually landing the job, was a casualty of one of the latest trends in business hiring. Companies increasingly rely on pre-employment background checks to ease security concerns and protect against costly lawsuits.

“It’s very important and it’s getting more important,” said Robert Belair, a privacy attorney in Washington, D.C., and editor of the Privacy and American Business newsletter. “The incidence of negligent hiring lawsuits is way up.”

But the burgeoning field lacks consistent standards, causing errors that can disqualify reputable job applicants, some industry experts and consumer advocates say. When criminals slip through with clean records, the consequences are more severe.

Early this month, FedEx Corp. was accused in a lawsuit of hiring a sex offender who was later charged with molesting an 8-year-old boy while at work in Fairfield.

FedEx spokeswoman Sandra Munoz said the company’s background check did not reveal a criminal history. The company conducts criminal background checks on all job candidates, she said.

“That person is either lying or Federal Express is wildly incompetent in how they do the background checks,” said Neal Rogan, the boy’s attorney.

But people with knowledge of the industry were not surprised by the charges.

“There are no standards for what is a background check,” said Tal Moise, chief executive of Verified Person, a New-York based company that performs background checks. “This is an industry that has delivered historically a very low quality product.”

A national task force funded by the Justice Department this month recommended national standards for screening companies.

“The nation’s security, as well as on-the-job efficiency, and certainly civil liberties and privacy interests, all demand the development of a blueprint,” the task force concluded.

Background screeners say companies must conduct thorough searches to determine whether applicants have criminal records. That means searching multiple counties and checking for addresses not listed on job applications.

In the FedEx case, the employee worked in Connecticut but had a criminal record in Maine, according to the family’s lawsuit.