What to do when an employee or contractor with clean criminal record does not remain ‘clean’?

OR why do I need address verifications when I am doing criminal record checks?

This blog post will look at the unfortunate situation which can occur for any employer – whether a business or an individual – when the employed person initially had a clean criminal record but ended up indulging in some criminal activity.

This is the reality of life. As the financial product / service disclaimers read – ‘past performance is no guarantee of the future returns’, so it is with the world of criminal background checks. A clean criminal record does NOT indicate that the person will always remain crime free. The will to indulge in criminal act can arise at any point of time – there always is the first time when a person will turn into a criminal.

So in such cases, there is no point in wondering how this could have happened as the past criminal record was clean. The best thing is to call in the police and share all the earlier reports and employee information with them. This is the point where earlier filed documents like ID proofs, address proofs and address verification reports will come in valuable. These will give a very good starting point to the police for their investigations.

And this also goes to highlight that doing just criminal checks is not sufficient. You need to save the ID, address proofs and also get address verifications done – preferably both on current and permanent addresses. This also answers the query which some of our clients (especially those who are business of providing contractors or any blue collar workers) have – they must get criminal and address verifications done, at the minimum.