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Government At Fault For Many Criminal Record Errors
December 01, 2012 posted by Steve Brownstein
by Dick Baggett
There are various reasons the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decided to reissue guidance on the use of criminal and arrest records in hiring decisions, among them:
Recent studies have found that a significant number of state and federal criminal record databases include incomplete criminal records.
A 2011 study by the Department of Justice reported that, as of 2010, many state criminal history record repositories still had not recorded the final dispositions for a significant number of arrests.
A 2006 study by the Department of Justice found that only 50 percent of arrest records in the FBI's database were associated with a final disposition. Reports have documented that criminal records may be inaccurate.
Even if public access to criminal records has been restricted by a court order to seal and/or expunge such records, this does not guarantee that private companies also will purge the information from their systems or that the event will be erased from media archives.
Criminal background checks may produce inaccurate results because criminal records may lack "unique" information or because of "misspellings, clerical errors or intentionally inaccurate identification information provided by search subjects who wish to avoid discovery of their prior criminal activities."
