Scaled-back background checks bill wins Idaho House panel’s support

BOISE – The Idaho House Commerce Committee voted unanimously Wednesday to introduce and send to the full House a scaled-down version of FBI background check legislation from the Idaho Department of Labor.

The House killed the earlier version on Monday when Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard, decried it as “an example of federal bullying.”

The new version allows the department only to conduct fingerprint-based FBI background checks on 26 employees who now have access to confidential tax return data, rather than allowing it to conduct checks on any employee or prospective employee. The department could lose millions if it doesn’t comply with the requirement to enact statutory authority for those background checks before next November.

Scott said she was satisfied with the scaled-back bill. She asked state Labor Director Ken Edmunds, “My question, it maybe seems odd, but I come from a very conservative district. And the questions I’m going to get from my citizens is going to be why would the Department of Labor come with such a huge request, and then settle for something so small. Can you give me some idea why that initial bill was even presented to the Legislature, if it was really not necessary?”

Edmunds said, “We didn’t want to come to the well too many times, and say, ‘Oh, we’ve got another five people here,’” so the department proposed “a more generic broad-stroke bill to do that. Unfortunately, that was not well received. … For now we’re limiting it this way because you made the request and it meets the minimum requirements that we have to do now, versus trying to be more broad-brush.”