In the state of Kentucky, only employees of nursing homes and assisted living homes (nurses, etc.) are subject to criminal background checks. These employees are typically the ones who provide direct care to residents. Members of the public are hailing this as a sane, common sense law, while others are lauding it as unfair to those who have undergone criminal rehabilitation.

On Thursday, the legislation was introduced to the 2012 General Assembly. The law states, among other things, that criminal background checks must be conducted for all long-term care employees. This law would extend background checks to janitors, and even dining room workers.

The motive for this law stems from a lawsuit filed in 2010. A Fayette Circuit Court found that a nursing home in Lexington unknowingly hired a registered sex offender as a maintenance worker.

The legislation is very exhaustive, and prohibits employment in nursing facilities or assisted living communities based on a variety of factors. The factors that would exclude employment are as follows: conviction of a felony related to theft, abuse or sale of illegal drugs, neglect, abuse, sexual exploitation of an adult, or any sexual crime.

The legislation was explicitly brought about in light of cases in which nursing home employees took advantage of residents. The exploitation was not only financial, but cases also documented workers taking sexual, emotional, and physical advantage of residents.

Lobbyists worked for nearly five years to draft legislation that would require background checks for all employees. The legislation was unanimously praised by these interest groups. One lobbyist stated "It's important because it affects the quality of the people taking care of our elderly population."

Similar legislation has also been brought about (Senate Bill 44) in the 2011 General Assembly, however, it failed. Lobbyists state that this may be because some lawmakers misunderstood the bill. Currently, no nursing home industry representatives have voices any opposition to the bill.

In June, a $3 Million dollar federal grant was given to Kentucky to conduct criminal background checks, using state of the art fingerprint technology instead of name based checks only. This grant for background checks was primaraly used by those in direct care facilities.

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Reviewing an organization’s background screening process yearly helps ensure that the procedures used follow the prescribed steps, and will identify areas of concern. Pre-employ.com offers a free analysis of background screening programs here: http://www.pre-employ.com/quote

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Service is the hallmark of your nonprofit organization. But in order render that service, your organization’s legal standing and its status and reputation in your community must be preserved.

To help insure this, your nonprofit organization needs reliable employee background checking and volunteer screening before a worker joins your team. Once people are onboard, your organization becomes vulnerable, and damage may be done before you become aware problems even existed.

If your organization’s reputation is damaged, its ability to raise resources and funds within your community can be seriously, and perhaps irreparably, compromised. You simply cannot afford to expose your organization’s image and sensitive information to new workers who have not been properly screened.

But the need for background checks introduces the problem of performing them lawfully. Lawsuits over unlawful background checks are a reality. Organizations cannot risk performing these checks without a thorough knowledge of federal, state and local laws. This dual problem of needing checks while not having the expertise to perform them without legal risk puts many organizations between a rock and hard place.

Pre-employ.com exists to solve these problems for you. Pre-employ.com provides the expertise and tools you need to rest easy knowing your employees and volunteers match the integrity your organization embodies. Our experienced staff will sit down with you to develop a set of services that meet your unique needs. Our nationally-recognized Volunteer Screening platform is easy to use and efficient.

A leader in pre-employment checking, Pre-employ.com provides criminal background checks on the national, state and local level, testing for drugs, sex offender scans, license verifications, credit checking, as well as other services. Pre-employ.com was founded in 1994 and maintains a stellar record of regulatory conformity and research. A recognized provider to Fortune 1000 companies, Pre-employ.com continues to set the industry standard for timeliness, service and technology.

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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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Googling yourself may be a fun way to burn a few minutes at work but, as a research tool, Google is generally ineffective. People often think they have a very unusual name until they Google it. A Google search will reveal numerous people with that same name who are as different from each other as their names are similar. You're seeking information on Joe Smith but which Joe Smith? Is it the Joe Smith who is a taxidermist, an internist, a plumber, a nuclear physicist, an inmate or a priest? How can you know for sure? The answer is that you can't. Even such defined details as a birth date, in the case of a very common name, are likely to turn up more than one result in a search.

The information is also never complete. The records are spotty at best. There's also the big problem of the reliability of sources. Anyone with a grudge against someone can post outright lies all over the Net. It has happened many times. If you consider the disparate opinions of ten people you know, can you imagine what they might have to say? Some like you and some don't. Some know you. Others don't know you at all but think they do. Are you to take the word of someone's disgruntled ex-boyfriend?

The average online biography is said to be less than 50% accurate. Those are biographies generally written by researchers, not netizens in general.

A professional background screening provider works around those problems. It will gather solid and current information. It will research places that Google can't possibly search. The information it brings out will be verified. There will also be a chain of information in case you need to do further research.

It will also bring out information that Google cannot. You'll have past addresses and patterns of relocation. You'll get the real data on jobs the person has held, including all the ones not on their work application. You can learn about past employers who can tell you important information you need to know. Any negative patterns in relationships will be visible. All these can reflect on the person you bring into your company. Forewarned is forearmed.

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The Social Security Administration plans to implement a new social security number assignment methodology on June 25, 2011. One of the reasons for this change is to extend the availability of social security numbers in all of the states. Under the current system, certain numbers of the first three numbers have been reserved for individuals from select areas. With the implementation of the new system, people in states that are more densely populated will have a greater availability of numbers for more years.

Another benefit to randomization of social security numbers is security. More people are compromising their personal information through the internet, such as social sites where they freely exhibit their date of birth and where they were born. Identity thieves use this available information to hack an individual’s social security number. Generating random numbers for people obtaining social security numbers will make it impossible for identity thieves to reconstruct the social security number of another by using public information.

The Social Security Administration will continue not to assign numbers beginning with 000, 666, or the number nine. In addition, the fourth and fifth numbers cannot be 00 and the last four numbers cannot be 0000. The SSA will not issue new numbers to people who already have a number: this change only affects people applying for a social security number for the first time. People are assigned social security numbers permanently and a number is not recycled after an individual’s death.

There are some instances where the Administration will reassign numbers. They include situations where sequential numbers assigned to family members are causing problems; more than one person is using the same number; individuals who have objections of the use of certain sequential numbers because of religious or cultural preferences; an individual who, through identity theft, keeps getting victimized; and certain situations of abuse, including domestic abuse, harassment, or life endangerment. In these instances where the Administration assigns an individual a new social security number, their old number will no longer be available for use by anyone else.

The Social Security Administration estimates that there are approximately 435 million numbers available at this time so there is not a need to change the quantity of numbers allotted in a social security number at this time. Finally, the changes implemented in the issuing of social security numbers will not change the ability of an employer to verify an applicant’s name and social security number. Several federal and state agencies will be able to continue to verify social security numbers.

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