Do you know who you are hiring? - preventing workplace and employee violence

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1997 by Edward Niam, Jr.

Education verification. Any company giving preference to or requiring a college degree or higher must verify at least the highest level of education obtained. In exchange for a payment, there are institutions that grant degrees, complete with transcripts. These diploma mills are in no way a recent phenomenon. Such institutions have been in existence since the late 1970s and currently are operating in approximately 20 states. It is possible, for the right price, to obtain any type of degree without ever attending a single class. If education is important for the job, it is worth verifying.

Civil litigation. A history of civil suits a person has been involved in can help fill in details about an applicant's background and character. Research of municipal, county, and Federal district courts can reveal judgments for monetary damages, injunctions, liens, child support, alimony, and bankruptcies. Most of this information is included in a pre-employment credit report.

Personal reference check. Information regarding a subject's strengths, integrity, and responsibility is obtained through an interview with references provided by the applicant. Reference checks can help establish an applicant's residency and ties to the community. Not all references say something nice about the applicant. It is not unusual for a personal reference hardly to know and even dislike the subject in question. Many applicants will list references haphazardly, assuming they either won't be contacted or will respond with polite indifference.

Should employers wish to go deeper, the developed reference is the next step. Additional names are obtained from the references listed by the applicant. The benefit of talking to these people is that they will not have been coached by the applicant to provide positive information.

Workers' compensation history. Fraudulent workers' compensation claims are becoming a serious problem for companies nationwide. These records can be accessed electronically from 18 states. The remaining 32 either do not release the information or make it difficult to obtain, with a turnaround time ranging from a few weeks to several months. Workers' compensation records are classified under the American Disabilities Act (ADA) that became effective for companies with 15 or more employees in 1994. This law states that "an employer may not inquire about an individual's workers' compensation history at the pre-offer stage." The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has interpreted that workers' compensation inquiries fall under Section 1630.14 (b) of the ADA: "A covered entity may require a medical examination (and/or inquiry) after making an offer of employment to a job applicant and before the applicant begins his or her employment duties, and may condition an offer of employment on the results of such examination (and/or inquiry) regardless of disability."

A workers' compensation history check is permissible only after an offer of employment is made. This offer can be conditioned on the individual's ability to perform the essential functions of the job. One benefit of a workers' compensation check is finding a claim at a company not listed on the application. It even could be in another region that should be searched for a criminal history of the applicant. The most important benefit of a workers' compensation check is the discovery of frequent, possibly fraudulent claims.