Study Shows Background Checks Don't Always Check Out
upstart writes:
Study shows background checks don't always check out:
Employers making hiring decisions, landlords considering possible tenants and schools approving field trip chaperones all widely use commercial background checks. But a new multi-institutional study co-authored by a University of Maryland researcher shows that background checks themselves can't be trusted.
Assistant Professor Robert Stewart of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Associate Professor Sarah Lageson of Rutgers University suspected that the loosely regulated entities that businesses and landlords rely on to run background checks produce faulty reports, and their research bore out this hunch. The results were published last week in Criminology.
"There's a common, taken-for-granted assumption that background checks are an accurate reflection of a person's criminal record, but our findings show that's not necessarily the case," Stewart said. "My co-author and I found that there are lots of inaccuracies and mistakes in background checks caused, in part, by imperfect data aggregation techniques that rely on names and birth dates rather than unique identifiers like fingerprints."
The erroneous results of a background check can "go both ways," Stewart said, They can miss convictions that a potential employer would want to know about, or they can falsely assign a conviction to an innocent person through transposed numbers in a birth date, incorrect spelling of a name or simply the existence of common aliases.
Stewart and Lageson's study is based on the examination of official state rap sheets containing all arrests, criminal charges, and case dispositions recorded in the state linked to the record subject's name and fingerprints for 101 study participants in New Jersey. Then, the researchers ordered background checks from a regulated service provider-the same type of company that an employer, a landlord, or a school system might use. The researchers also looked up background checks on the same study participants from an unregulated data provider, such as popular "people search" websites.
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