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Les Rosen's Corner Les Is Quoted On NPR
June 01, 2012 posted by Steve Brownstein
In an article recently published on the National Public Radio (NPR) website, Attorney and safe hiring expert Lester Rosen, founder and CEO of background check firm Employment Screening Resources (ESR), says employers must perform a kind of balancing act with background checks since "every story of a person denied a job because of some youthful indiscretion decades in the past" is usually balanced by a "case of a registered sex offender whose record was not properly checked before being hired for a job involving interaction with the public."
The NPR article "How Much Can Potential Employers Ask About You?"is available at: http://www.npr.org/2012/05/21/153201730/how-much-can-potential-employers-ask-about-you.
"Our approach has been, there should be a job for everybody, but not everyone is appropriate for every job," says Rosen, the author of "The Safe Hiring Manual," the first comprehensive guide to background checks.
According to a recent study by the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) Broken Records: How Errors by Criminal Background Checking Companies Harm Workers and Businesses more than 90 percent of U.S. employers conduct criminal background checks on at least on some job candidates.
"You don't want to have a police state," adds Rosen, a frequent speaker on background check issues as part of the "ESR Speaks' program, but you also don't want any liar or miscreant to get any job they want."
In the NPR article, Rosen says current regulatory pressures and lawsuits over misinformation will help "cull the herd a bit" and lead more employers to use reliable and professional background check companies instead of "cheap vendors that charge only $10 or $20 and then perform cursory searches of databases often riddled with inaccurate information" as described in the article.
USA Company Forfeits $2 Million To Satisfy Illegal Hiring Claim
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) " the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)" recently announced in a press release that a Houston, Texas-based tree trimming company has avoided criminal prosecution for employing illegal workers by agreeing to forfeit $2 million to the DHS related to revenue derived from the employment of illegal workers. The company has also agreed to adhere to revised immigration compliance procedures that include the use of E-Verify, a free electronic employment eligibility verification system run by the U.S. government. The press release from ICE is available at: http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1205/120518houston.htm.
According the press release, ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents began investigating ABC Professional Tree Services Inc. (ABC) in 2008 following complaints that a significant portion of the company's employees were undocumented aliens. HIS agents reviewed the Employment Eligibility Verification Forms, known as "Form I-9" , and other documentation for approximately 2,500 employees at the company. As of the second quarter of 2009, the inspection had revealed that "a significant number of employees", about 30 percent of the workforce, consisted of undocumented aliens who had presented invalid personal identification information when hired.
