Compliance Enhancements Notice from Justifacts
Assisting Our Clients to Remain in Compliance
The increase in state laws surrounding the use of background checks for employment is creating a challenge for employers to maintain a process that is in compliance. Justifacts wants to assist our clients by providing enhancements to our system that help to identify when the background screening process needs altered based on laws or regulations.
Justifacts is reviewing state laws in all 50 states to identify areas where we can provide enhancements to our system that will assist our clients in meeting this challenge. This includes:
- Location of job field
- When to ask about:
- criminal records
- salary
- When to alter the wording in pre-adverse/adverse action letters
- When to provide specific state disclosure notices.
- Individualized Assessment (IA) Tool
In order to protect the interests of our clients, their applicants, and Justifacts, we have implemented a system to identify those clients and applicants that are located in states that have laws or regulations that require some change to the standard background check process.
In order to properly ascertain what laws apply to a particular report when initiating an Applicant Portal request, you must now provide a “Physical location of the job”. This field defaults to the client contact address. This will only change if the applicant is being hired in a different jurisdiction.
Using the client contact address, applicant address and location of the job allows Justifacts system to:
- Display the appropriate state disclosure, rather than displaying all state notices (available for Applicant Portal users only)
- Remove the “Have you been convicted of a crime?” question from the authorization (available for Applicant Portal users only)
- Remove the previous salary fields
- Display notices in the adverse action initiation process to inform clients when specific information should be added to the standard pre-adverse and adverse action letters
- Filter criminal record search results based on state law
Additionally, in light of the 2012 EEOC requirement that an “Individualized Assessment” be performed whenever using criminal records in a hiring decision, Justifacts is offering a free Individualized Assessment (IA) tool that is used to meet these requirements. According to SHRM, “The goal of the EEOC guidance was to help people in demographic groups with higher incarceration rates get jobs and not be automatically excluded from the candidate pool due to a criminal history.” This tool will also assist in complying with the many state laws that now require individual assessments when using criminal records as a basis for a hiring decision.
We are confident that these enhancements will be useful to our clients and allow for a background screening process that is compliant with the patchwork of laws and regulations that employers face.
Thank You,
Compliance Department
Justifacts Credential Verification, Inc.
It is important to note that Justifacts is providing this information as a service to our clients. None of the information contained herein should be construed as legal advice, nor is Justifacts engaged to provide legal advice. We go to great lengths to make sure our information is accurate and useful. We recommend you consult your attorney or legal department if you want assurance that our information, and your interpretation of it, is appropriate to your particular situation.
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