Our local or state police will do background checks, so why would we use ScreenNow®? [back to ScreenNow]

ChoicePoint® Response

Our ultimate goal as a company is to help our customers protect their residents from sexual offenders and other criminal offenders that may be working or volunteering at any assisted living, skilled nursing, Alzheimer’s care, adult day care or in-home care. For this reason, if a retirement community has access to free or less costly background checks through their local law enforcement agency or other state agency, we will not discourage them from using that as an option. We would, however, encourage communites to include a national criminal file search as a supplement to their local searches. They should also recognize some drawbacks to relying on local searches entirely.

Here’s why we strongly recommend the National Criminal File Search in addition to the local criminal searches:

1. It is a statistical fact that serious offenders often commit their crimes outside of the state or county where they currently reside.
2. The national search helps uncover additional information that the employer might not be aware of. Employees and volunteers might choose to withhold certain information (such as previous addresses) on an employment application. How do you know if the employment application is correct and includes all previous residential addresses? The national criminal search might uncover a criminal offense committed in areas of the country that the employer is not searching.
3. We live in a very transient society. On average, employees switch jobs once every couple of years, which makes the national criminal file search especially important.

1. Local police departments might provide information that is not Fair Credit Reporting Act-compliant. For example, arrest records might be included. You can get in legal trouble for using arrest information in the hiring process. ChoicePoint does not report arrest records to employers as outlined by the FCRA.
2. Information obtained from local law enforcement agencies might or might not be up to date. County checks might be needed as a follow-up to make sure that the criminal file contains the most current information available. That’s additional time and money spent on background checks that could have been avoided working directly with ChoicePoint.