Criminal background checks incomplete

Is there a felon in the next cubicle? What about in your child's afterschool athletic league?

Employers and volunteer organizations are increasingly turning to national commercial database searches provided by private firms to ferret out potential convicts from their ranks. The searches are quick, inexpensive, and promise nationwide coverage -- in theory, preventing convicted felons from moving away from a checkered past.

But experts say the nationwide tallies are often full of holes, and contain as few as 70 percent of all felony conviction records, leading in turn to a false sense of security.

Spotty participation by the nation's 3,100 county courts, along with a hodgepodge of data formats, make national crime databases vastly incomplete, said Rhonda Taylor, CEO of Intellisense Corp., a Bothell, Wash.-based boutique background check firm.

"We've done tests, and the national databases have a 41 percent error rate," she said.  "(There is) a glaring issue related to a false sense of security if that information is relied upon with no other investigative tools."

Such national repositories of private information took center stage earlier this year when ChoicePoint Inc. announced in February that thieves had stolen personal dossiers on 145,000 U.S. citizens. A string of high-profile data thefts followed -- including the announcement this week that thieves took personal information belonging to 310,000 people from LexisNexis -- and so did a series of public outcries and congressional inquiries.

Those inquires continue this week, with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., hosting a Senate Judiciary hearing Wednesday on "Securing Electronic Personal Data: Striking a Balance Between Privacy and Commercial and Governmental Use." 

Striking that balance is most important, and perhaps most challenging, in the complex arena of criminal background checks and volunteer organizations. Keeping convicted predators and other felons away from children, while maintaining some standards of fairness, is a much harder task than need be, according to industry experts.

Inexpensive, but incomplete
ChoicePoint is one of a handful of firms selling inexpensive national crime database search tools marketed to volunteer organizations. Its VolunteerSelect.com service is one of the more popular ones; the firm says it's executed about 1 million searches since the site launched in 2002. The results are nearly instantaneous, and at about $2.50 per check, it is an economic way to examine the backgrounds of potential volunteers.

But even ChoicePoint concedes that national crime database searches offer incomplete results.

Spokesman James Lee said that there is only one way to conduct a thorough criminal background check: combine computer-based nationwide searches with old-fashioned in-person visits to county courthouses which house criminal record information. 

ChoicePoint also says clearly on its Web site that a database search has its limitations and "should always be used along with policies and procedures that help to protect children and other vulnerable populations."

"Any due diligence is better than no due diligence," said Jeff T. Collins, CEO of Integrated Screening Partners.  His firm does background checks for Dell Computer Corp., and he's also started a new consumer service called SafeDate.com, for backgrounding potential love interests. "But if people get an (electronic) criminal background check and think their problem is solved, they are fooling themselves."

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