Can a background check company in Texas reveal a non criminal conviction (from another state) to an employer?
I know in some states it is illegal for a background check company to reveal a non criminal conviction (violation) to an employer. Is this the case for employment background checks done for employment in Texas, and if so where in the law does it state this? Does it matter if the background check company is physically located in Texas or is there a loop hole for this?
Answers:
In Texas and other states, employers have the right to do criminal background checks themselves, but most employers hire a service to do that .
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires an employer to get written authorization from an applicant to do a credit check if an outside agency will be used – in addition, if the applicant is turned down, the employer must tell the applicant why and let them know the name and address of the service that furnished the information.
The FCRA prohibits credit reports from including non-criminal violations, such as a conviction that only results in a fine. The FCRA applies nationwide.
Note that the restriction on reporting non-criminal convictions only applies to credit reports. If the employer does the research himself, he is entitled to any information that he obtains from public sources, and all convictions (of any type) are public information. The employer can also purchase a background check that could reveal the same information as long as it is not included in a credit check.
You can perform a free background check yourself to see what information is available.
Like many answers, it all depends on the details:
What information do you want?
How much work are you willing to do to get it?
How fast do you want it?
If you are willing to do some work yourself, you can perform a background check on someone for free.
Criminal Background Check:
Criminal records are kept by the Clerk of Courts in each courthouse. Every city, town, county, state, and the federal government have their own courthouses. We know there are 50 states, 3000 counties, and over 30,000 cities, towns, or townships in the USA. That is a lot of courthouses, and most of them do not share their information. However, it is all public information, and you are allowed to review it.
If you know where the subject person has lived and traveled, then you know which courthouse records to check.
Do-it-Yourself Free Background check issues:
a)One problem is finding out your subject-persons lifetime travel history. He could have committed a crime anywhere he has ever been.
b)2nd problem is the amount of work you must do to check every courthouse in those locations.
c)3rd problem is that you could miss important records if you miss any of the locations that your subject-person has been to.
d)4th problem is cost. If the courthouse has digitized their records and published them on a website, then you can often review them for free. But if you must travel to the courthouse, that requires your time and travel costs. Finally, if you get copy of the record, some courthouses charge $1 per page. Wow! That can be expensive.
e)So a do-it-yourself background check may cost you a significant amount of money if you want to perform a complete background check.
Other Records:
You will probably want to check out some other records on you subject-person.
Do your want to know about:
Marriages and Divorces
Bankruptcies
Tax liens
Civil law suits
Professional licenses
Corporate ownership
Property ownership.
All of that information is public, and you can review it. But, you have the same issues that you had with the Criminal Records. The information is not all in one place. You have to find out where it is, and you may have to travel to those locations.
Information Aggregators
On the internet, some companies specialize in collecting all of this public information, putting it in their database, and making it available for instant access. For example, Illinois Youth Soccer (http://www.iysa.org) has a Risk Management publication that refers to
http://backgroundsearch.com
You can review some of this information for free and get the results immediately on the internet.
How to Perform a Do-It-Yourself Free Background Search & Check:
Step #1 – At an information aggregator, like BackgroundSearch.com , you can put in your subject-person’s name and find every city that he lived-in. That website provides this information for free. You can enter as many names as you like, as many times as you like. Now you know which courthouse records to review.
Step #2 – At the same website, you can find a list of the Criminal Record Offices of every city, county, and state in the USA, along with their website (as reported to the U.S. government.).
Step #3.- Go to the courthouse website, or to the courthouse (if they do not have a website), and review their public records.
Step #4 – Back at BackgroundSearch.com, you can find the Record Offices for Vital Records (Marriage, Divorce, Births, Deaths). Repeat step #3 for Vital Records and any other type of records that you need.
Purchasing a Background Check:
If you want to get a complete report, instantly, you can purchase a comprehensive background check from BackgroundSearch.com (or other information aggregators). Every company (without exception) will charge you something for a complete background check. The companies have to cover their costs to gather all of the public information, put it in a database, keep it up to date every day about everyone, and make it available to you on the internet for instant access.
Sex Offenders:
The U.S. government does keep a list of all convicted sex offenders in one place. You can find it here: http://www.nsopr.gov/
Source(s):
Good luck with your background check research.
the background checks that companies make does not show squat. only a police department has access to that information
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