Background checks for small businesses
The Wall Street Journal has been adapting articles from their forthcoming Small Business Guidebook and publishing them in the paper and on their site. Here's a powerful paragraph from one of those articles, titled: How to Avoid Hiring a Bad Egg. Small businesses, unfortunately, are particularly vulnerable to embezzlement and other kinds of employee theft because they lack the checks and balances of big corporations. One report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that the median loss for small firms with fewer than one hundred employees was $190,000. The most common schemes? Employees fraudulently writing company checks, skimming [...]
Criminals at the court
In Farmington, New Mexico, the job description for a Court Services Coordinator (similar to a probation officer) lists the following. "Certified substance abuse counselor or five (5) years experience in the criminal justice system required." That usually means "working for a criminal justice agency" not "as a criminal being processed by the system." But, it turned out that Court Services Coordinator Christos Derizotis had lots of experience in the criminal justice system that the city didn't know about. According to an article in DUI Attorney headlined "City official fired over New Mexico DWI arrest," it was only after Derizotis had [...]
Faked references for a fee
The American entrepreneur and department store executive, John Wannamaker, once said that "Half of all the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." Sounds to me like what you face with resumes these days. You know there may be falsehoods mixed in amongst the truth. But it's hard to tell which is which. It just got harder. In an article advising job seekers on truthful strategies for dealing with problem references and resume gaps, CNN discusses web sites that will fake your references for a price. They identify one such site, CareerExcuse.com. This goes [...]