PRESS RELEASE
November 14, 2002
"objective risk management services"
American Businesses are obliged to protect themselves from terrorist infiltration
as a part of U.S. Homeland Security. This is especially true for food,
pharmaceutical, medical, communications, electronics, chemical, transportation,
and several other industries.
Today, only about one third of all businesses perform I.D. Verification and
criminal background checks on prospective employees, temps, and contractors.
However, the real problem is that to save money, many businesses that do check,
use stored data from gigantic databases that they can access inexpensively on
the Internet. In almost all cases, it has been anywhere from 1 to 18 months
since those databases were last updated with current records from each of the
respective court jurisdictions. Updating frequency is a question of the
money it takes to buy copies of the records from the respective courthouses.
What this means for Homeland Security is that any given business that elects to
use stored data is ignoring the "time gap" in the data. The "time gap" is the
time between when the stored data vendor last updated their records from the
latest courthouse files, and the current date. If this has been 12 months for
instance, the applicant being checked could easily have outstanding warrants or
criminal convictions in that period of time, and THE BUSINESS WOULD NEVER KNOW.
It is actually a serious violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which now
governs all reports about consumers purchased for business purposes, to use stored
data in the event of ANY adverse report. However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC),
which enforces the FCRA, is under-funded to enforce the law. Dr. John Allan, President,
has put forth the idea that "the Department of Homeland Security must be given funding
that can be used to bolster the FTC's enforcement of the FCRA. Businesses must be
forced to use freshly retrieved data for their own protection."
American Business can easily comply with the FCRA, and have affordable records that are
never more than 24 hours old, by using freshly retrieved data. There are plenty of U.S.
vendors that can quickly and cost-effectively obtain criminal conviction histories
directly from America's 3,100+ courthouses on a daily basis for American Businesses.
Dr. Allan, a nationally recognized expert on background checking, would be happy to
schedule a discussion of this topic with any members of the media so that American
Businesses can better understand the unintentional risks that they are taking, and
the potential Federal fines they may incur, by using stored data.
The Integrity Center, Inc., Founded in 1984 in Dallas, Texas services business,
industry, and government nationwide in the areas of Risk Management, Personnel
Security, and Online Personnel Records. The firm and its website are a rich
resource of current information regarding the laws and procedures in these areas.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Director of Press Relations
The Integrity Center, Inc.
(972) 484-6140
info@integctr.com
|
|
