An employment background screening provider will pay $2.6 million to settle allegations that it violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Federal Trade Commission reported last week.
According to the FTC, the firm, HireRight Solutions Inc., failed to:
- Use reasonable procedures to assure maximum accuracy.
- Give consumers copies of their reports.
- Re-investigate consumer disputes as required by law.
The FTC alleged that HireRight didn’t follow reasonable procedures to ensure information in reports were current and reflected updates — such as expungement of criminal records.
The company also failed to use reasonable procedures to prevent obviously inaccurate information from being provided to employers and, in numerous cases, included the records of the wrong person in reports, according to the FTC.
Criminal background checks are often used by employers on both regularly hired workers and contingent workers.
A survey released last month by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 69 percent of organizations conduct criminal background checks on all candidates while 18 percent conducted them on selected candidates.
Only 14 percent of employers did not used criminal background checks in 2012, according to the SHRM survey. However, the percentage not using such checks is up from 7 percent in 2010.
