Tell customers about your background check policy
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 can make their point better than I can. August 27, 2001, Sue Weaver was brutally raped and beaten to death by a twice convicted sex-offender hired to do service work in her home. Sue had contracted with a major department store to have the air [...]
Lessons from the federal government
The Federal Drive, a show on Federal News Radio recently offered the following advice to job seekers: Background check in your future? Don't lie! One of the things that I got out of the material is the difference between the federal government and other employers. The show included comments from Debra Roth. She's a partner in the firm of Shaw, Bransford and Roth, that specializes in Federal employment law. Here's just one comment. "Lying to the federal government almost always, in current times, will get you criminal charges." That's probably not true for your company. The biggest stick you've got [...]
The danger of not checking
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 to an elderly woman’s death at the hands of her crack cocaine addicted neighbor in 2007. The sons of the woman asked for more than $10 million in damages. The "negligence" was not conducting a proper background check on the neighbor. If you're a [...]
Organizational justice
The April 2010 issue of Risk Management has a great article titled: Finding and Fixing Corporate Misconduct. After noting reports that misconduct had declined during 2009, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) says the following. According to the results from more than 300,000 employees in over 75 countries, this "decline" in misconduct during 2009 is actually misleading, as it pertains to less severe and risky behaviors such as the misuse of company resources or other 'inappropriate behavior.' In other words, no matter what you may have heard, there's pretty good evidence that more serious forms of misconduct actually increased last year. [...]
Why are they publishing those awful stories?
If you spend time online or watching television, you could get the idea that the media don't want you to use credit checks as part of your hiring process. Here are two examples. The Wall Street Journal ran an article titled: Bad Credit Derails Job Seekers. The lead told the story of Rosa, a single mother of three, who wasn't hired because of (she thinks) a poor credit report. MNBC had Bad Credit Sidelines Some Jobless Workers. They led with the story of a woman who "believes an unpaid medical bill cost her a full-time job." You're going to see [...]
It takes a village to catch corporate fraud
The question, "Who blows the whistle on corporate fraud?" is also the title of an article that will be published in the Journal of Finance. To find the answer, the authors studied "all reported fraud cases in large U.S. companies between 1996 and 2004." Here's the answer they came up with. "We find that fraud detection does not rely on standard corporate governance actors (investors, SEC, and auditors), but takes a village, including several non-traditional players (employees, media, and industry regulators)." That's good news. It means that you've probably got honest employees on the payroll who may spot fraud, even [...]