The other night, a friend told me about a debate in his homeowners’ association. Some members wanted the association to require contractors to certify that they conduct criminal background checks on all new hires. Others think that’s extreme.
My friend asked me what I thought. I referred him to the Sue Weaver CAUSE website. They […]

PI Newswire, a news service for private investigators, splashed the following headline across the screen of my computer. Jury Finds Housing Authority Negligent in Elderly Woman’s Murder after Tenant Background Check Misses Neighbor’s Criminal Past. Here’s part of the lead.
A jury recently ruled that negligence by the Housing Authority in a North Carolina city led […]

Normally, the world of screening and security has me reading reports on fraud and stupid corporate stunts. Every now and then, though, my Google Alerts throw something juicier up on my screen. That’s what happened this week.
A blog named MomLogic published a post by Dr. Wendy Walsh with the title, “Sandra Didn’t Believe the […]

John Phillips is one of the country’s leading experts on employment law. The good news for us is that he writes an excellent blog, The Word on Employment Law. There, he puts what he knows into terms that non-lawyer HR people and real-life managers can understand and use.
His February 16, 2010 post, “Alabama Shooting […]

WBNS-TV10 in Central Ohio reports on a really horrific story. It involves an unusual twist on the issue of criminal background checks as part of hiring. Here’s how it goes.
Karen Carter applied for and got a job as business office manager at a nursing home called the Sanctuary at Tuttle Crossing in Central Ohio. According […]

Workplace violence statistics are hard to come by because they’re scattered all over. But we know it’s serious and we know that you need to act to help keep your employees safe and keep yourself out of court.
Here are some statistics from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the U.S. Department […]

Fox News reports that John Mark Karr is serious about proving that he has no convictions in Alabama, where he asked for a background check from the Birmingham Police Department. It seems like only yesterday, but it was actually a year ago that John Mark Carr was all over the news.
You may recall that […]

You probably don’t know who Wendy Adcock is, but right now she’s the focus of a lot of attention in Columbus, Ohio. That’s the home of the Ohio State University (OSU) who hired Adcock in 2005 as an accounts clerk at the university libraries.
The OSU student paper, the Lantern, describes the situation in a story […]

In October, news media carried the story of an off-duty police officer who shot seven people in Crandon, Wisconsin, killing six of them. Normally that would not concern us here because we talk about issues related to the use of background checks by employers and landlords.
Earlier this month, though, organizational development consultant Daniel Schroeder […]

This is a “man-bites-dog” story about background checks. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel recently carried a story about how charter boat captains are starting to do background checks on their customers.
This isn’t as weird as it might sound. It turns out that those charter boat captains have a good reason. They don’t want to suffer the […]