Outdated and incomplete background check results have cost thousands of people a chance at employment and are leading to flawed dismissals as US employers increase their reliance on FBI screening methods when doing their homework on potential workers.
Consumer groups say that there is a high potential for racial
discrimination because most FBI records only list an arrest, not
the outcome of that case, according to the Washington Post. A
lawsuit on behalf of minorities against the Commerce Department
claims that Latinos and African Americans are denied employment
in greater numbers because of the incomplete reports.
A Bureau spokesman told the Post that the FBI relies on state
records to supply the checks; a practice they say
“decentralizes the criminal history responsibility by making
the states, rather than the FBI, primarily responsible for record
maintenance and dissemination.”
The revelations come as the number of background check requests
has multiplied by six over the past ten years. Entire industries
require all prospective employees to undergo FBI screening,
including, since 2011, port workers, truck drivers, mortgage
processors, and others.
“Although considered the gold standard of criminal background
checks, the FBI records routinely fail to report important
information on the outcome of arrests, information that is often
beneficial to workers subject to these reports,” wrote
Madeline Neighly of the National Employment Law Project, which
released a report Tuesday. “Given the massive proliferation of
FBI background checks for employment — roughly 17 million were
conducted last year — these inaccuracies have a devastating
impact on workers, especially workers of color who are
disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice
system.”
Neighly and her co-author, Maurice Emsellem, go on to call on the
FBI to simply ensure that an individual’s record is complete
before it is released. NELP also estimated that 600,000 reports
released by the FBI over the past ten years were inaccurate in
some way.
Making matters worse, state records are often just as
disorganized. Twenty-seven states reported a backlog of records,
according to a 2010 Justice Department report quoted by the Post,
while almost half of the 50 states found that two out of every
five records were missing final outcomes.
The discrepancy coincides with an announcement from the American
Civil Liberties Union that it plans to fight by against racial
bias partly facilitated by FBI technologies.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation is collecting racial and
ethnic information and ‘mapping’ American communities around the
country based on crude stereotypes about which groups commit
different types of crimes,” the ACLU wrote on its website.
“Nationwide, the FBI is gathering reports on innocent
Americans’ so-called ‘suspicious activities’ and sharing it with
unknown numbers of federal, state and local government
agencies.”
The federal government received approximately 4 million
applications for Census worker positions in 2010. Roughly one
million of that sum was put on hold because of FBI background
checks, at which point those applicants, who were not told what
information about them was flagged, needed to prove to within 30
days that the FBI the background check was incorrect in order to
remain in consideration.
Among those who turned up in the FBI’s database, according to the
Post, 41 per cent were black and another 20 per cent were
Hispanic. Those numbers, if approved for a class-action suit,
would encompass approximately 850,000 people to form the largest
discrimination suit in history.
“It was a dramatic screen of basically anybody with any
interaction with the criminal justice system,” said lawyer
Adam Klein, whose firm is handling the case. “It included the
craziest things.”
Republished from: RT