News Alert: Your Sex Offender Background Check May Be Incomplete 29 May 2018

Can you afford to cut corners on your sex offender background checks? It turns out that some leading background check companies are skipping certain sex offender registries during their checks. While we can’t comment as to why they’re skipping these registries, we can share why this is dangerous and how you can avoid it.

Recently, one of our sales staff was speaking with a customer. In the past, this customer had worked with a very popular background check service. But, they were dissatisfied because the background check service was skipping 10 sex offender registries during their checks.

Obviously, just because a company is a leading service with a strong brand, it doesn’t mean that they provide a quality service. This means that when you choose a background check service, you need to make sure they do a thorough job. Especially, in a check as important as a sex offender background check.

Why this Is so Dangerous

A study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that many sex offenders are able to use loopholes to get rehired. The study found that many schools had unknowingly hired individuals with a history of sexual misconduct. Of these individuals, 40% committed sexual misconduct again after being rehired.

As a business owner, you don’t even want to imagine the danger this could cause to your employees, clients, or yourself. Incomplete sex offender background checks lead to poor hiring decisions, which can cost you dearly.

What Your Sex Offender Background Check Should Include

Running a complete sex offender background check shouldn’t be difficult. Every state and US territory maintains a sex offender registry. These are made available to law enforcement agencies and companies like Trusted Employees. This is done with the goal of protecting the public and maintaining transparent records. With this goal in mind, we check every registry available to us.

What are the red flags that a background check is incomplete?

• The background check service refuses to give you a complete list of the registries that they used.
• The report includes a footnote stating which registries or checks were excluded from the report.
• The background check service only offers a sex offender registry check for the applicant’s state of residence and doesn’t offer the option to run a nationwide check.

What can a bad sex offender background check look like? In the case of the customer who spoke with us, they received a report with a footnote. The footnote stated that 9 US states and 1 US territory were excluded from the sex offender search. This is an alarming red flag for anyone running a background check.

So, what should your sex offender background check include?

• It should include a nationwide sex offender background check option.
• This check should cover the sex offender registries from every US state, as well as reservations and territories.
• Your background check service should openly share the list of registries that they used to run your background check.

These are the things that Trusted Employees does to ensure they offer complete background checks. And we hope that other industry leaders will soon be offering the same complete service.

Choose the Safe Option

Trusted Employees takes sex offender background checks very seriously. We don’t want our customers to suffer the results of making a bad hire due to an incomplete background check.

To ensure we always provide the most complete data, we offer nationwide sex offender registry checks. During these checks, we review 175 sex offender registries across the country. No shortcuts, no loopholes, just solid data you can trust.

If you’re wondering whether your current background check provider might be cutting corners, then contact us. Our team is happy to review the reports you’ve received and help you understand what might be missing.