Bad Data Fouls Background Checks


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By Kim Zetter | Also by this reporter

02:00 AM Mar. 11, 2005 PT

When Kenneth Schustereit was 18 years old, he tried to swipe a pile of what he thought was scrap metal from a machine shop's parking lot and ended up spending part of his summer vacation in jail for misdemeanor theft.

That was in 1974. Thirty years later, Schustereit is still paying for his crime.

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Find local technology jobs. That's because a background check of his criminal record sold to employers by ChoicePoint data brokers erroneously reported that his misdemeanor was a felony. It also stated that he spent seven years in prison when he spent 51 days in county jail.

Schustereit discovered the mistake only after Home Depot turned him down for a job last year and mentioned the report. He thinks the report cost him half a dozen other jobs as well, although he doesn't know for sure, since most employers don't tell job applicants why they've been rejected.

I have a stellar work record, said Schustereit, who was laid off nine months ago as a quality-assurance inspector at a Texas plant. But the problem is that I write down a 30-year-old misdemeanor on the application, and when they look it up, it comes up as a felony. It makes me look like a lying convict.

Recent security breaches at ChoicePoint and Seisint have raised awareness about data brokering and the role that these companies play in identity theft.

But the breaches have brought little attention to another problem with data brokering that can cause just as much harm as identity theft -- inaccurate data.

In addition to selling personal information about millions of people to marketers and government agencies, data brokers collect information from public records and sell it to employers conducting background checks on prospective workers.

Employers facing problems with violent workers, falsified credentials and workplace theft have legitimate reasons for seeking background checks. And obtaining such reports has become increasingly easy and cheap when masses of information can be collected electronically and sold online.

But there are no standards for assuring the accuracy of data. And incorrect or misleading information can lead to lost jobs and public embarrassment.

Legislation is currently going through Congress that would establish oversight of data brokers to help prevent identity theft, but it doesn't address problems with data accuracy. The onus for finding errors and correcting them will still be on members of the public.

A 2004 report by the National Association of State Public Interest Research Groups found that 79 percent of credit reports may contain some type of error. There's no reason to believe that criminal records are any more accurate.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act, which covers background checks for issues related to employment, requires that employers get written permission from subjects to perform a check on them. But workers seldom have a choice in the matter if they want a job. If applicants or employees lose a job or promotion because of information in a background check, workers are entitled to receive a copy of the report from the data broker that provided it.

But what's to prevent a company from doing a check and saying they're not going to hire you for another reason? said Ronald Peterson, who believes he lost jobs because of his reports. You and I don't have a right to look at who has asked for our records.

Getting misinformation in a file corrected or removed is another battle.

Misinformation can occur for a number of reasons -- clerks mis-key information, criminal charges get dropped but not updated in files, or arrested suspects provide authorities with the name and Social Security number of someone else. If data does get corrected in one database, there is no way to ensure that it's corrected in other databases.

Easy access to masses of digital data that never goes away also means that people are less able to make a clean start in life even after they've served their time or been cleared of charges.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly ran criminal background checks on more than 7,000 employees working for its outside vendors and barred hundreds of workers from the company, including a man who lost his position because of a 6-1/2-year-old dismissed misdemeanor battery charge that should have been expunged from his record.

We're becoming a nation where there is no social forgiveness, said Beth Givens, founder and director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. We've got to have wiggle room in our society to accept mistakes we've made in the past. But you can't do that anymore because of records being permanently in these databases.

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Frequently Asked Questions Related Stories
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