Just Plain Scary: ChoicePoint Makes Big Money Repeating Hearsay
An interesting article in this week’s Business Week blows the lid off the background screening business in the US. This has become, warns BW, “a big business, but not always an accurate one.”
They go on to report that “whatever their motives, employers are becoming more dependent on mass-produced background reports that rely heavily on anonymous, and sometimes inaccurate or unfair, sources.” Bosses who have fired managers report information, which is then verified by call center employees working desperately to check numerous cases in very little time.
The four page article is well worth reading and mentions a number of companies by name, mainly covering ChoicePoint, part of the Reed Elsevier group. Based in a leafy Atlanta suburb, ChoicePoint says it checks applicants for more than half of the country’s 100 biggest companies, including Bank of America, UnitedHealth Group, and United Parcel Service.
To paraphrase the arguments these reporting agencies use in their defence, their point seems to be that they are only reporting allegations provided by third parties. They can not of course be expected to decide on guilt or innocence, much less the merits of indiviudual cases. That is up to individual employers. So it’s much like if the police gave up investigating crimes, and simply started reporting to the Courts what other people say about them, without taking responsibility for the content of the evidence.
However, it seems insidious that individuals’ careers and lives may be affected by reporting of allegations that are not proven… or even, in some cases, have been disproven in a court of law.
Where will this go in the future? One commenter on the Business Week website points out:
ChoicePoint is also one of many firms that Homeland Security and other government departments use to gather information on US citizens that they are otherwise prohibited from obtaining directly. Getting errorneously ensnared by ChoicePoint’s machinery would be bad enough — imagine getting crushed by government bureaucracy as well. Link to this comment
We at Global Nomads would add, expect to this this trend towards spying on your neighbor extended soon to other Big Brother countries, starting with the UK and Australia.
Here’s another comment:
Why would background checking agencies let allegations that have not been proven in a court of law carry the same weight as a conviction? Personal opinions and finger pointing are inadmissible in court as evidence, so why would they be a-ok during a background check? More alarming is that employers are placing all their trust in reports of personal gripes and unproven allegations when making their decisions. Who knows if your former boss is in a bad mood and decides to smear you in an interview? He could kill your career while venting his frustration on a random day. That’s just plain scary. Link to this comment
Just plain scary: that’s a good way of putting it. Protect your privacy today by refusing to allow such background checks. If you run a business, don’t get talked in to unethical background checks by some smart-talking salesman. Read up on Global Nomad privacy techniques at this site!
