Small Business Today Magazine OCT 2014 THE EFFORT COMPANIES | Page 42
EDITORIALFEATURE
What Is Needed to Run a
Comprehensive Background Check?
By Paul Marcus
T
he question of what type of comprehensive
background check a person or company
should do comes up very often. There are
many types of background checks that can
be done but not all of them will give you the necessary protection. I would like to take a moment
to explain the types of searches you may see advertised and then briefly discuss them.
Here are the components of running a comprehensive background check on a prospective employee or individual that you may want
checked out for nonemployment purposes:
1. First, you must have a Release and Waiver Form signed by the applicant giving you
permission to run a Consumer Report on
them.
2. The next step in a background search should
be to run a Social Security Number Trace
which will validate whether or not the Social Security number is a valid number. This
search will not tell you whether the Social
Security number actually belongs to the applicant but it will tell you the validity of the
number and show you places in which the
person holding that number has resided.
This is very important information to run the
needed searches.
3. The third part of the search is to run a multistate or multijurisdiction alias search which
will check and bring up records on persons
using that Social Security number. If there is
a hit that comes up in the report, that hit
must be checked in the local jurisdiction
where it happened. This is the law under the
Fair Credit Reporting Act. A small disclaimer about this search, even though companies
will promote and advertise these searches as
a “National” search, it does not cover every
jurisdiction in the country and not all of the
jurisdictions provide the same type of information.
40 SMALL BUSINESS TODAY MAGAZINE [ OCTOBER 2014 ]
First, you must have a Release
and Waiver Form signed by
the applicant giving you
permission to run a Consumer
Report on them.
4. The most important step in the process is to
run searches in every jurisdiction the person
has resided in the past seven years under the
names listed in the Social Security Number
Trace and other names you know this person has gone by. This step is so important
because the criminal justice system begins
in the county and records are stored in the
county. It has been reported that up to 90
percent of all criminal acts are committed in
the county of residence.
5. There are a couple of other searches that can
be done on a statewide system, those being
a state repository search and a state court
search. The state court search is the recommended search to run due to the fact that
the state repository may be missing important and timely information that the counties
may not have reported yet.
6. The final search that should be run as as part
of the criminal package is the Federal Criminal Records Search. This search will check for
persons who may have had charges in the
Federal Court System. Some of the charges
that may show up in Federal Court include
offenses dealing with weapons, drugs, and
money. This search will not show up on a
state, county, or multijurisdictional search. It
has to be run as a stand alone search.
Paul Marcus is a licensed Private Investigator,TX License Number A13506. He is the owner of Affordable Searches, LLC, a
licensed Investigations Company in the state of Texas, License
Number A17778. For more information, contact Paul by phone
at 281-494-6691, by email at [email protected],
or visit his website at www.AffordableSearches.com.