The Association of Premier Nanny Agencies - News and Articles Blog

By Lynn Peterson, President of PFC Information Services, Inc.

Harvard Emeritus Professor, Derek Bok, once said, “If you think education is expensive, consider the cost of ignorance.” By the same token, if you think pre-employment background checks are expensive, consider the cost of placing a nanny with a criminal record.  While a typical background check costs only a small portion of the placement fee, placing just one candidate with a serious criminal record has the potential to sink an agency-not to mention the fact that a child could be harmed.

Nanny agencies should be particularly concerned about negligent hiring lawsuits.  An employment agency can be held legally and financially responsible for unlawful or improper acts of an individual placed by an agency when no pre-employment background check is conducted and the individual has a prior criminal record.  For example, twenty-eight year old Christina Appleton was stabbed to death by co-worker, Arvie Carroll, a convicted murderer placed with Iron Horse Vineyards by a temporary agency that did not bother to conduct a background check.  The jury awarded $5.5 million against the temporary agency that had placed her murderer at the winery.  According to industry experts, defendants in negligent hiring suits lose sixty percent of the time, and the average verdict award in such cases is $870,000.

Families and agencies have a legitimate need to know whether candidates have relevant criminal convictions.   The demand for background checks has soared in every industry, not just among nanny agencies. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 80 percent of employers are now routinely conducting background checks. By comparison, only about half of employers bothered with them in 1996.  Our company has been conducting background checks on nannies since 1987.  In the early to mid 1990’s few agencies included background checks as a standard component of the candidate screening process.  Today most agencies conduct at least some form of a background check on their candidates; and families have the expectation that if they are hiring a nanny through an agency a background check would have been conducted.

It is imperative for agencies to have a safe hiring program in place.  This process should start before a candidate is allowed to fill out an application.  The candidate should be told up front that a background check is part of the screening process. This in itself may provide a deterrent to applicants with a criminal past, as they may move on to another agency that doesn’t conduct background checks or they may respond to newspaper ads or Craig’s List postings by families.  The application should include a question about whether or not the candidate has been convicted of a crime.

A criminal check is a key component of any background check.  However, the criminal check has become a “buyer beware” product.  Many web-based information brokers provide criminal checks that sound very good-they are cheap, provide instant results, and claim to be “national” in scope. In reality, many online criminal check databases are so full of holes that they provide little more than a false sense of security.  The best method for checking criminal records in the US is to send someone out to the courthouse to manually search the records. While this sounds ridiculously low-tech in this day and age, the simple truth is that there is no national criminal database available. Obviously, checking the criminal court records in the locations where the applicant has lived does not provide a guarantee that the person has never committed a crime. However, U.S. Department of Justice statistics indicate that most crimes are committed a short distance from where the criminal has lived. 

The Social Security Number verification is another standard component of most background checks.  This check provides an extensive address history, as well as the name or names that are associated with the use of the SSN.  So, if you know where the applicant has lived, and you know what names she has used, you can determine where the criminal checks need to be conducted. Therefore, the SSN verification makes the criminal check more effective.  The Social Security Number verification can be extremely important in cross-checking information listed on the candidate’s application.  For example, if she claims to have lived and worked in Sacramento for the past six years, but an address in Los Angeles is reported two years ago, this certainly would be a red flag. The Social Security Number verification also provides the agency with information about whether or not the SSN is valid, as well as when and where it was issued.  Very authentic looking Social Security cards can be purchased on the street for about $135.00. The SSN verification frequently detects fraudulent SSN’s, numbers issued before the person was born, or numbers that belong to a deceased person.

While the criminal check, combined with the Social Security Number verification, is the front line of defense against placing a criminal, doing additional types of background checks in combination increases the likelihood of spotting a problem, if there is one.  Most agencies request a driving record as part of the standard background check, whether the nanny will be driving on the job or not.  The DMV record can point to substance abuse problems when there are DUI’s or reckless driving convictions.  Beyond that, if the nanny has moving violations or accidents, and if she repeatedly fails to pay his tickets or show up for court dates, this indicates a pattern of behavior.  This individual may not be someone who can be counted on to be responsible with the children.

To quote from an article that appeared December 30, 2005 in the San Francisco Chronicle, “there are no standards for what is a background check.This is an industry that has delivered historically a very low quality product.  A national task force funded by the Justice Department recommended national standards for screening companies.” Given the lack of standards in the background screening industry, it is imperative that agencies educate themselves about what they are actually getting when they request a background check.  If a screening firm offers instant results at bargain basement prices, something is very wrong.  Just as the cheapest nanny agency probably isn’t the best agency, the cheapest background screening company is definitely not providing a quality product.

As stated, the more checks conducted in combination with one another, the more powerful the background check.  Our company has performed many tens of thousands of background checks on all kinds of employees-from nannies to physicians to factory workers.  We have found consistently that when there is a criminal record, there is also likely to be inconsistencies with the names and addresses reported with the Social Security Number verification, and there will probably also be unpaid traffic tickets and bad credit.  All of these various checks in combination point to patterns of behavior.  There is no substitute for careful interviewing and checking references.  However, objective, fact-driven information must be part of the front-end evaluation process.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Articles for Agencies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.