Dear Liberty...Your Questions, Answered

Liberty received a great email the other day from a concerned employer:

"My current vendor for pre-employment background checks gave me an All-Clear on a candidate I screened in May 2009. The person has been employed at my company since then, but was recently arrested, ON SITE, for their active warrants!! When I contacted our vendor about it, they said the type of investigation we elected to implement didn't include the outstanding warrant! Of course, our company had no choice but to discontinue service, but my question to you is: How is it possible this wouldn't show up??"

There are many types of pre-employment criminal investigations, and they are not created equal. The type of search performed on your employee is not comprehensive and that is how records can be missed.

Many companies, especially in this day and age, choose these types of searches, called database searches, because they are less expensive. Be wary, often, when you're paying for less, you're getting less.

Liberty utilizes these database searches as well, but for very different reasons. Our QuickCheck search is a national criminal records search, but Liberty uses it as a pre-screening tool, a stop-gap measure that has the possibility to eliminate candidates in a matter of minutes.

Candidates that clear through the QuickCheck are sent on to perform a deeper more comprehensive background investigation that thoroughly searches criminal records from counties the candidate has resided in, and looks under any alias name we can find on the candidate.

Of course, that deeper investigation costs a legitimate amount more than our QuickCheck, but our clients know what they've got as soon as we do: peace of mind.

submit your questions here.

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Senators Demand Review of Government Terrorist Watch List

Three US Senators believe that the Maryland State Police Department entered the names of 53 peaceful protesters into the federal databases that watches terrorist activity, and they are demanding a list of those databases.

Benjamin L. Cardin (MD-D), Barbara A. Mikulski (MD-D), and Russell Feingold (WI-D) are the senators involved. "We want to make sure the individuals that are impacted are cleared," said Cardin. "We're not sure what has been done with the federal data bank and we're not sure what procedures are in place to make sure that this doesn't happen again."

Maryland police say they intend to purge their internal files as well as the files from the drug-trafficking database, and are adamant that the names did not reach the no-fly list or the other databases, "at no time was any individual placed on a terrorism watch list," said Maryland State Police spokesman, Greg Shipley.

Though citizens may be aware that list such as these exist, they may not realize the far-reaching impact of them. Liberty's Quick Check search actually utilizes many federal terrorist database lists in an effort to reduce workplace violence and crime.





Washington Post article

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