In today’s scenario, employee verification have become a necessity. However, it is also true that verifying can only reduce risk, not eliminate it. There is no doubt about the fact that thorough background verification goes a long way in ensuring a strong foundation for any company in the form of good employees. Yet this does not necessarily ensure that an employee with a picture perfect background on papers will never succumb to any wrongdoing ever. If this happens, the accountability of a verification agency automatically becomes questionable. To what extent is an Employee Background Verification agency legally liable for its reports?
Everything that a verification agency does is available for easy reference to the employer in the form of employee verification reports. These reports give a conclusive summary about the background history of any given employee. Can these reports prove to be useful when a verified employee is caught cheating? Let us investigate further.
Employee Verification Reports
In most cases, verification agencies provide reports that cover a wide spectrum of information ranging from address, education, criminal records to the social media presence of the employee, for a specified tenure. The reports are generated after conducting extensive physical, telephonic, and online verification. The employment verification is carried out by contacting the HR department of past employers directly. Address, education and criminal verifications are done by physically going to the address/educational institute/police stations. A quality assurance team checks all the verification reports and random audits are conducted to ensure accuracy. Basically, a lot of hard work is put in creating these reports individually for each employee. Utmost care and precision is taken to cross check the minutest of detail.
How to use the Verification Reports?
This information should only be used in conjunction with other reliable and verified information obtained by an individual/company from a different source, duly verified before any kind of litigation. Decisions on hiring or termination employees should be taken only in coherence with the applicable state and national laws.
In the event of using the information contained in the reports for criminal, civil background checks, it should not be assumed that the information provides a person’s complete criminal or civil history as in most cases the verification requests pertain to the employee’s activities in the past one to ten years. Therefore, it becomes difficult to determine whether there is a history of misdemeanor, before or after the specified duration.
The Accountability factor
The verification agency is certainly liable for the accuracy and veracity of the reports it has provided at the time of employment background verification, but not liable to any employee actions or discrepancies which occur after the point of initial verification. A verification agency does not claim to monitor, or investigate anybody’s movements 24/7. This is the reason why ongoing periodic verifications are necessary and highly recommended.
I can attest that all background companies are not reputable yet we do live in a world where agencies make mistakes.
@ Tasha Lester. Thank you for the comment/reply. As long as the reputed agencies continue to learn from the mistakes and rectify their processes, it might go a long way in eliminating events of corporate fraud/scams.