Credit checks

The Houston Chronicle recently ran an editorial about background checks for taxi drivers in that city. Here’s the gist.

By April, taxi drivers who wish to pick up or drop off passengers at Bush Intercontinental Airport will have to pass a background check by the Transportation Security Administration. The cabbies, 80 percent of whom came here from African nations such as Ethiopia, Nigeria and Somalia, protest that the background checks are redundant and discriminatory. They are right about the redundancy. Houston taxi drivers must undergo an FBI background check before they receive an operator’s license. If that screening is meaningful, there should be little need for another. Federal security officials say they will use databases to confirm drivers’ immigration status, but that has more to do with immigration policy than airport safety.

I’m with the Chronicle. If you do the job right, there should be no need to keep doing it over while you spend more money and time. You want your background check system to be both effective and cost-effective.

But there are times when you want to run more than one check on the same person. Here are a few of them.

When you’re hiring, run both a criminal background […]