Most employers can easily grasp why running a quality background check is important, but unfortunately there are many myths floating around about background checks that could get even a well-meaning employer in trouble.

One myth is that there is some kind of national database to which private employers have access which contains all the information an employer could ever need to ascertain a potential employee’s criminal history and to confirm the education and employment information they have claimed. If only it were that easy.

Doing a thorough background check necessitates a lot of legwork and attention to detail. You have to know where to look, and you have to look in a lot of places. For a criminal background check, for instance, there are over 10,000 courthouses in the United States that have relevant records. These courthouses must be visited in person; they do not combine all their records somewhere for the convenience of employers.

A related myth is that to do a proper background check you need only consult commercially available databases.

Unfortunately while such commercial database services might seem attractively inexpensive, you get what you pay for. How likely do you think it is that the folks who compiled these databases went to all 10,000 courthouses and checked and double checked everything to minimize false positives and false negatives? Not very.

A third myth is that as an employer it’s really not too hard to do a background check that’s “good enough” so that if anything does go wrong you can’t be blamed.

In fact, the due diligence that is required of you can be quite stringent, not to mention unpredictable since it may boil down to what a given jury decides on a given day would have been a reasonable effort on your part to investigate a potential employee.

A fourth myth is the common belief that employers can disqualify an applicant based on a criminal conviction without a business justification.

Once a person has “done his time” the law does not allow him to be indiscriminately penalized the rest of his life by being rendered unemployable. If the nature of the job, the specific offense he committed, the amount of time that has elapsed since the crime, etc. indicate that he would be a substantial risk, then yes, you are within your rights as an employer to deny him a job. You are not required to hire a convicted sex offender to work at your day care, for instance. But if he smoked marijuana 25 years ago, that’s not sufficient grounds to rule him out for employment repairing clocks in your shop.

If you’d like some help maneuvering around these background check myths, the professionals at Pre-employ (http://www.pre-employ.com) are available to provide background check services to enable a growing business to avoid the legal and staffing problems that can arise all too easily in the hiring process.

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Henry Ford once said: "Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes; the swing in your gait, the grip of your hand. The Irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas." In addition to providing employees with a healthy and professional working environment, employers must also do whatever they can to maintain an optimum level of employee enthusiasm. These are the most common problems that modern day employers face, and they must be overcome in order to maximize employee productivity.

One of the most widespread epidemics that contribute to an overall decrease in employee productivity is illicit drug use. The truth is that around 10% of all adults regularly abuse illegal narcotics. The number of younger adults using drugs, aged eighteen to twenty-five, is notably higher—resting somewhere around 19%. American adults who use illegal drugs more often than not suffer from injuries, illnesses or depression. These are all negative characteristics that can affect employee productivity and punctuality, and can also contribute to an above average number of work days missed. This means that companies could lose thousands of dollars annually if they employ regular drug users.

In order to avoid this cumulative and costly loss in general productivity, it is important for employers to rigorously screen all would be employees before making a decision on which ones to consider for employment. This can be achieved through the use of drug testing. Today there are millions of employed Americans, in both the private and public sectors, who are regularly subjected to urinalysis drug tests. In fact all government, state, and county employees are tested for drugs as a condition of getting or keeping a job. This helps employers recognize the otherwise unidentifiable applicants who could pose a threat to their companies’ productivity and profit margin.

Employers have the right to know exactly who they are hiring. Some groups of people and organizations oppose drug testing, claiming that a person’s private life should be kept separate from their work. This would be a sound argument if the line between the two was not so frequently crossed through the use of illegal drugs. Drug testing is only a breach of a person’s privacy if they have something to hide. The DOT approves the right of employers to require a drug test before employees can be hired.

Testing prospective employees for drugs is such a necessary and common occurrence these days that there are companies who specialize and handle the whole process. Drug testing is a useful and resourceful method to help curb productivity inefficiency.

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Audrey Grabarkiewicz, left, and Sarah Lindsay (CBS/WSPA)

SPARTANBURG, S.C. (CBS/AP) Audrey Grabarkiewicz and Sarah Lindsay, two South Carolina teachers who worked with pre-school children, have been arrested and accused of corrupting teens at several parties that included drugs, alcohol and sex.

Multiple media outlets reported that 42-year-old Lindsay and 44-year-old Grabarkiewicz of Boiling Springs, S.C. were arrested Monday by Spartanburg County sheriff's deputies.

The alleged "sex parties" took place in July and August of this year, at the suspects' homes, police told CBS affiliate WSPA.

Grabarkiewicz was a preschool teacher at Lake Bowen Baptist Church. She was charged with 10 counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The church's pastor said she was fired on Monday.

Lindsay, who worked as a kindergarten teacher at Boiling Springs Elementary, is charged with nine counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and criminal sexual conduct with a minor between 11 and 14 years old.

Lindsay resigned from her job Monday.

Grabarkiewicz was released from the Spartanburg County Detention Center Wednesday morning after posting a $25,000 bond and agreeing to home detention, according to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal.

She was also served with divorce papers by her husband of 17 years, Eddie Grabarkiewicz, who has asked for "complete care, control and custody" of the couple's three children, ages 12, 9 and 7, and child support, his lawyer told the paper.

Lindsay remains in jail on a $50,000 bond.

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According to a study done by the Justice Department, estimated that 25 percent of college women will be victims of rape or attempted rape before they graduate within a four-year college period, and that women between the ages of 16 to 24 will experience rape at a rate that's four times higher than the assault rate of all women.

Megan Wright was a 19-year-old freshman at Dominican College in 2006 when she was allegedly gang raped on her college campus, and later committed suicide.

In the case of Megan Wright, a 19-year-old from New Jersey. Wright was wrapping up her freshman year in May 2006 at Dominican College, a small Catholic school in Orangeburg, N.Y., about an hour away from New York City, when she was allegedly gang raped on its campus. She committed suicide before the year ended.

Her mother, Cindy McGrath, is suing Dominican, claiming that the college failed to conduct a proper investigation into her daughter's assault, and thereby violated Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which guarantees equal access to education.

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Over 100 child care centers in Florida are involved. Rather than order the tests, workers forged signatures on documents stating the checks had been performed.An investigation with the Department of Children and Families shows more than 100 child care centers did not have proper background checks performed on new employees. The DCF worker, rather than order the tests, forged signatures on documents stating the checks had been performed.After the investigation started it showed both employees were forging documents going back over a year.Falsifying any DCF records and documents is a felony in Florida. DCF officials said they have not pressed charges against the two yet.

DCF said their investigation showed none of the children were in any type of danger because of the forged documents. 

3 WORKERS LEAVE

Preliminary investigations by DCF into its child care licensing office in Daytona Beach show DCF workers, in some cases, falsified records and forged signatures, and did not ensure that centers and homes had current background screenings in the files. Some inspections also were not done, even though reports in the file and on the agency's website stated they had been completed. Falsifying DCF records is a felony under state law. One DCF worker, Melanie Herring, was fired in June. The other worker, Karen Smythe, resigned in June, as did the supervisor, Freneau Surguine. The office, not counting the supervisor, had three licensing workers who handled 70 to 80 cases each. One worker remains, a new supervisor has been hired, and the remaining two positions are to be filled soon. The three former workers did not return calls by The News-Journal, but Smythe told DCF during the preliminary investigation that she was overwhelmed with her own work while helping another worker and asked for help many times, but didn't get any.

KIDS ESCAPE CENTER

One of the child care facilities in question was Beautiful Beginnings in Holly Hill, where a toddler and a 4-year-old girl walked away from the center April 13 and were gone for at least 30 minutes until they were found by a neighbor and police were called. An e-mail sent to DCF staff April 21 that sparked the investigation into the Daytona Beach office refers to an anonymous report about inspections not being done properly, including at Beautiful Beginnings. Officials at DCF said they have since found that background screenings were up-to-date for Beautiful Beginnings and the owner told DCF one reinspection had been missed in 2009. The center was fined and put on probation for the April 13 incident. DCF's Inspector General's Office has picked up the overall investigation into the local child care licensing office and the work by Herring, Smythe and Surguine. But preliminary reports by DCF licensing staff released to the Daytona Beach News-Journal in response to a public records request show:· Eighty-eight centers or homes did not have current background checks in their file, including, in some cases, Florida Department of Law Enforcement screenings, FBI fingerprint checks, local screenings and checks to the abusehot line. Some of the centers have since provided proof of current screenings, but they were not previously in DCF files, according to Pam Buckham, child care licensing safety program manager for the region that includes Volusia and Flagler counties;· Fifty-two centers or homes did not have a copy of the current inspection in the file, although they were in the computer system. It is unclear exactly how many were falsified, Buckham said.· Fifteen checks and a money order, some dating back to 2007, were found in drawers or files that had either not been sent to FDLE for background screenings or were not cashed by DCF for license renewals. In some cases, child care centers thought the employees had an approved background screening because the checks were sent to DCF.·  In eight day care centers or homes, signatures on inspection reports were forged. Two others, DCF staff say, appear altered.

'WORK IN PROGRESS'

DCF officials have stated that despite the problems, which they say are "horrible," at this point they have not found any indication that child safety was compromised. But John Harrell, DCF spokesman, said not all background screenings have been completed and that it's "a work in progress." "I think it's tragic," regional safety manager Buckham said. "I think we have a job that the community expects us to do to ensure child safety and to make sure child care facilities are following the requirements. It's devastating." Buckham said the local office had some vacancies before discovery of the problems and she asked the supervisor if he needed help, but Surguine told them it was under control. Herring, the worker who was fired, also told DCF during the preliminary investigation that Smythe was overwhelmed and had asked for help from Surguine, but didn't get any. Herring denied not going out on inspections, despite child care centers telling DCF she didn't, and that they did not sign the reports. Herring was questioned about an internship she had separate from her job, and told DCF she took files home and did inspections late in the day and worked on weekends. Smythe's file shows she admitted to officials that screenings were not always completed and she did not have time to file paperwork. Surguine had been with DCF since 1999 in different capacities; Herring worked in the child care licensing office since 2006 and Smythe since 2004. DCF staff from Tallahassee and Jacksonville are helping conduct inspections, license renewals and background screenings to ensure state requirements are being met. "We're trying to get it all fixed and get things the way they should have been," Buckham said. Child advocate Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said that if any records were falsified, the state doesn't know whether conditions at certain day care centers are adequate. Wexler said most workers at DCF and at child care centers wouldn't put children's safety at risk, but he said if those in question did falsify or didn't ensure files and inspections were complete it is a "severe betrayal of the trust of innocent children."   

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