A long-time client asked us to review an existing young employee who was being promoted and transferred within the company. This employee was asked to update her vital information on an application form. On the form he indicated that he had a PhD in International Human Resources from the University of Oxford – THE Oxford in the UK. The employer thought it strange that he didn’t mention that when he applied for a $ 7 an hour ad sales job two years earlier. The client asked us to check it.

They faxed the information and I took a look at the application and within seconds I knew the applicant was lying. I called the customer and told him I would save him the price of an international check, “I know you are lying.” Said. “How can you know?” they asked. “Because he said he attended Lady Margaret Hall (university) in Oxford and misspelled Margaret. Anyone with an Oxford Ph.D. would not misspell the name of the university. Of course, we went through the motions and called Oxford and found that LMH did not offers human resources degrees. I should have chosen another university in Oxford to lie. Think about this one. I already had the promotion and still lied.

The Ugandan Nanny

This happened recently. A woman from New York called and asked if we could do a criminal check on a Ugandan man who planned to hire as a babysitter for her baby. I asked him, “Why?” She asked me what I meant by why. I said, “Why the hell would you hire someone from a place where there is no rule of law, where any criminal check I can get is not worth the paper it is written on, and where this person is from a region of the world? That’s the home of AIDS. “What are you thinking?” I asked. I was being polite. I really thought I was crazy. Now, I know what I said wasn’t politically correct, but it’s the truth. He said, “Maybe you’re right. “I had a feeling that I was the first sensible and practical person he had ever spoken to on the subject. I should have charged him for parental advice instead of criminal control, but hey, I’m a good boy.

The swimming pool excavator

A colleague at a local pool company had an employee he had already hired checked out and put to work digging pools with a backhoe. At the time, our office was in Temecula, California, and the new hire was digging pools in Palm Springs, which is about two hours away. It took a couple of days to get the hand search records from Utah, where the worker had previously lived, and to our amazement the employee was wanted for escaping from jail in a rural Utah county. He was also a registered sex offender in Utah. It is important to note that this happened in 1995 before we used the Internet. Everything was done by phone and fax and it was much slower.

I called the customer right away with the great news. Now, normally, we provide the information and it is the customer’s responsibility to act accordingly. In this case, I offered to find out what the customer should do with this “dangerous” employee. I asked an assistant of mine if her husband, who was a Riverside County deputy sheriff, could drive to Palm Springs and arrest him. We found that it doesn’t work that way. They have to serve a court order from Utah jurisdiction and that could take days. Thought the officer might get “extra credit” or something for arresting a wanted bad boy. I guess I watch too much TV.

I called the District Attorney’s office for that county in Utah, but there was no response to my call. Then I called the Sheriff’s office in that county and spoke to the Sheriff. (Think Andy from Mayberry here.) I told him I called the district attorney’s office, but there was no answer. He told me they were all fishing. I asked him if he knew of the pool digger and he said yes. I said, “Well, come get him. He’s in Palm Springs. I’ll give you the address.” To which he replied, “We don’t want him. If he’s in Palm Springs, he won’t bother anyone here.” “You can’t do that,” I told him. “Hell I can’t,” he said. He then proceeded to tell me that they were a small county and that the extradition would require a mountain of paperwork (which he was unwilling to do) and then they would have to send someone to California to pick up the prisoner, bring his Sorry, go back to Utah, then the county would have to pay to keep him in jail for the next several years. In fact, I was doing the county a huge favor and saving them a ton of money by failing to do so.

Meanwhile, my client, the pool company, is in a panic. Remember this is before we were on the internet. I got directory help and found the only bail bond agent in Utah County. I called and asked if they were looking for this pool excavator. They were. The bail bondsman in Utah asked for the address where the pool digger worked and said, “We’ll have some guys pick him up in about 2 hours.”

I can’t tell you how many times the above story has been instructive to me. It is the epitome of government vs. private sector. The government moves with glacial slowness at high cost with mountains of paperwork, while the private sector does the job better, faster and cheaper.

The wanted killer

We did a criminal check on a client who was hiring dozens of people per month. The client operated a call center and we quickly learned that telemarketers have a disproportionate amount of criminal records for whatever reason compared to the general population. Imagine that.

The file of an applicant that we were checking and low came back and lo and behold, the person was wanted in Los Angeles County for murder. I called the customer immediately to inform her. He said it was strange that he called her at that time because he, the applicant, was waiting in the outer office to see her. She was really scared.

I called the police in his town and explained the situation to them and they told me to tell the customer that it would take a while to process the order; to stop him and let him go home, thinking that in a couple of days he would start work and that he would be arrested at his home on the weekend so as not to endanger anyone in the client’s office. By the way; the police had to ask me for the man’s address so they could go and arrest him.

The ballistic nurse

This happened on the day of the bloody glove at the OJ Simpson trial, June 15, 1995, a day I will always remember.

We were running a background check on a nurse from a hospital in Southern California. Los Angeles County Superior Court finds that we have incorrect criminal information in the criminal search. They did a name search but did not match date of birth or Social Security number and reported that the subject of our criminal review was a drug dealer prostitute who had multiple arrests and convictions. We subsequently report this incorrect information to our client. (FYI: This is the only documented case that my company made a mistake on a criminal background report.) When the applicant nurse had her job offer rescinded, she went crazy. The client later told me that he was yelling, ranting, delusional, cursing, and threatening lawsuits against everyone.

We immediately re-investigated the logs and quickly found the error. Still, even though we were wrong, the client did not want to hire the nurse. She had shown her “true colors” by ranting, raving and screaming. She had been escorted by security and in no uncertain terms, they didn’t want her in the hospital anymore. The client asked us if there wasn’t anything else we could find to give them the legal terms to rescind their job offer. We did some more research and found that she had, in fact, extended her employment history to cover a 90-day job at another hospital where she was laid off. Because he lied by omission in his application, the offer was canceled.

Timbuktu

Let me first say that I have always wanted to do a background check in Timbuktu just so I can honestly say that we have vetted people everywhere from Temecula to Timbuktu. This happened just a couple of weeks ago and prompted the writing of this article. A gentleman emailed and asked if we could see a person and his company in Timbuktu, Mali in West Africa.

If you are unfamiliar with Timbuktu, it is a real place on the southwestern edge of the Sahara desert and surely one of the most remote places on earth. Think of the French Foreign Legion desert outpost with camel caravans traversing it. I read somewhere that recently you had 400 phones and 2 internet lines. Woof!

I told the client that since we had never done anything in Mali, he would have to check what is available and how long it would take etc. I am one of the few experts in the United States on international background checks. People contact me all the time asking how to get records from far away places. When even I can’t figure out how to get records from somewhere, I call the local US embassy in that country. We can usually work things out from there.

I can’t say anything more specific about this case, but I can say that surprisingly we were able to get quality information quickly and we discovered another West African internet scam involving gold dust and probably saved the client tens of thousands of dollars.

The Good Looke One customer ordered a credit and criminal background check on each new hire. We verified a new employee and about a month later that employee called me and said she was the new Director of Human Resources. He was going over the policies and procedures and he wanted to ask me about background checks. He asked me if it was worth the cost of doing a credit report and “What can you really say about a credit report?”

I said, “Let me tell you about yourself.” He was doing this purely from memory from his report a month earlier. I said, “You’re single, you’re about 31 years old, you’re a college graduate, you’re originally from New England, you live in a rented condo, you drive a modestly priced Toyota or Nissan, and you’re single and handsome.” She said, “Wait a minute, how can you know all that? I explained that most of it was informed guesswork on my part, but I didn’t see any spouses listed, I saw student loans, a social security number that started with 1, auto loans and the numbers at her address told me that she lived in a condo. “What about the sexy part?” She asked, “There’s no way you can tell that from a credit report.” I said I noticed I had a credit card with a $ 1000 line of credit at Victoria’s Secret and I know that ugly women generally don’t shop there, so you have to be pretty.

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