Name: Less Visibility, More Risk: What Court Redactions Mean for Hiring Compliance
Uploaded: 2026-05-07T18:30:07.951Z
Duration: 57 min 46 s
Description: Less Visibility, More Risk: What Court Redactions Mean for Hiring Compliance

Transcript for "Less Visibility, More Risk: What Court Redactions Mean for Hiring Compliance": Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's session, less visibility, more risk, what court redactions Mean for Hiring Compliance. And that title captures exactly what we're going to be unpacking over the next hour. We're talking about court redaction trends, what they mean for your background screening program, and most importantly, what you can do about it right now. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so we're gonna dive, right in. So background screening has always depended on one thing, access to accurate, complete court records. That's the foundation the entire process is built on. That foundation is shifting. Courts across the country are redacting personally identifiable information from public records, and they're doing it at an accelerating pace. What we're not talking about, an isolated jurisdiction or a one off ruling. This is a systematic change, and the data that employee employers have historically relied on to make consistent defensible hiring decisions is becoming less complete and harder to verify. And that's the program problem we're here to talk about today. So the next slide. So what this session is, before we go any further, what we're gonna talk about is what the session is and what is not. This is a practical walk through. We'll cover, what court reduction trends are, why they are accelerating, and how they create real exposure for employers. What this session is not, we're not here to give you legal advice or jurisdiction specific guidance. That's a conversation for you and your legal counsel. This is also not a product demo or a sales pitch, and it's not a theoretical overview. Everything we're covering today is based on what's happening right now and, in real jurisdictions affecting real hiring programs. So questions are welcome throughout today's session. We'll start today at the court level, what's actually changing, which jurisdictions are leading the shift, and why the pace is picking up. Then we'll move to what it means for employers downstream, data completeness, screening consistency, and adjudication. From there, we'll dig into the compliance and privacy tension because, that this isn't a, you know, a clean problem. Employers are caught between duty of care and applicant privacy rights, often with no safe harbor. We'll close with proactive organizations, what proactive organizations are doing now, practical concrete steps you can take before the gap widens, and we'll finish up with a q and a. So just a quick couple housekeeping announcements. The recording will be sent out the following day. You'll receive a link for the on demand recording. Please, ask any questions and use the q and a tab. You'll find that on the right side of the screen. We loved your participation. We'll run a few polls during today's session, so we'd like your feedback. We will also launch a survey at the end of the session, and we appreciate your feedback there as well. And, also, I will share our an invite for our next webinar, and I found my first typo. It is actually on June 3 and not June 4. So, I will put the registration link in the chat panel, so you can register for that during today's session. And good morning to everybody out there. Thank you for, your salutations. So let's meet today's, presenter. Leading today's session is Mark Glascock. He's the senior director of operations at Mitratech, where he leads operational strategy across HR compliance and background screening solutions. Mark brings deep expertise in human resources and screening program management. And what makes his perspective particularly valuable today is that he approaches this as a practitioner. He's not at this, you know, from a purely I welcome Mark to the stage. And, Mark, take it away. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining. I'm excited to go over this topic. It's something that we've been talking about, much more recently, with many of our clients and many of the people in the industry. So let's dive right into, where this all began. So, courts have always redacted information, whether it's financials or, you know, full, Social Security numbers. But, back in 2001, we started to see these jurisdictional restrictions come up, you know, starting really in California with some laws passed there. And while the laws were passing in place, there's a really slow adoption by the courts to start redacting this information. But surprisingly in 2021, 2022 it really kind of took steam, and that's when we started to see these courts actually go in and start to redact information, information that we really need to be able to find information, match information, stay compliant, and be able to to report records to individuals that they could use in hiring decisions. Many, many jurisdictions now have also moved those formally automated process to a manual process where you have to go to clerks to get additional information. And these rulings are really kind of spreading like wildfire across the country, and I know that there's a lot of people who are very well aware that, it's almost monthly we're hearing of new legislation popping up in different jurisdictions, looking to create these types of restrictive, rulings. So the jurisdictions that are, really kind of leading the shift, as I mentioned, California really was the catalyst for this, and it seems like California and New York really are driving a lot of and adopting a lot of these rules, first that other states are are are coming off of. So, the ruling really affected, Riverside and LA at first. Very very impactful because there was not a lot of communication sent out to people who use that information to make decisions and it was pretty much a flip of the switch and suddenly all that data was gone. That left everyone scrambling from both sides of the fence whether it was a CRA, you know anyone that would access this information from a public standpoint and also employers. The next really large impact state was Michigan. Michigan went full force very quick across the entire state forcing every jurisdiction to redact everything but a full name, really making that information useless. Thankfully with some of the efforts of the PBSA, you know they are really pushing a lot of these jurisdictions to carve a little wedge in there so that if there's a permissible purpose, those that type of information can still be accessed. And then soon to follow was Virginia, Kansas, South Carolina, all with our own versions of various redactions and processes in place to really try and control and keep a tight and close, grip on, privacy of the information. And then this bred into the clean slate laws. So, going a step further, really leaning into protecting the privacy of candidates, general public, almost to the point where it feels like it's being put before the safety of employers and their brands and their, you know, their employees is, you know, also taking into account there is, you know, good news with Clean Slate. It does help people who, you know, people make mistakes, they have, you know, issues in their in their past and, you know, they move on from those things. So a lot of these clean slate laws are now coming to fruition that are setting up, criteria that is basically stating, and it varies by jurisdiction, that if an individual is convicted of a crime and they are giving sentencing information post convicting activity etcetera, upon the successful completion of those criteria if the charge type qualifies there's a move to seal those records automatically And that's kind of like the the crux of what Clean Slate is. And this makes it difficult because this pulls even more records out of the pool of disability to make hiring decisions on. And so, you know, that's also affecting, you know, state by state look back jurisdictions, look back timings. There are states that, you know, everyone's used to the seven year rule where seven years is kind of the general scope that, we are looking for for any sort of, you know, reportable record to use in a hiring decision, but there are jurisdictions using Clean Slate to kind of shorten that window. There are a couple jurisdictions in Michigan who are limiting to five years and some other places six years. Again, narrowing that window of information, usable information, to review, in your hiring practices and hiring criteria. It's also one of the fastest growing changes in compliance in the country next to, adverse action handling. So some of the states currently with clean slate laws, I won't go through them all one by one, but here's a list of states that actively have clean slate laws, in place, and there is a little bit of a trailing gap in some of this work because while the laws may be in place, the the ruling, the legislation is worded very different by state. Some of the states it's very clear that the courts it's the court's duty to make sure that these are being sealed, according to the rules put in place. Obviously many people know court clerks and you know a lot of this don't have the time and energy or the space to be able to kind of do this, there's also not a lot of technological advances on the court systems to, highlight, find, and, you know, seal these records, meaning that there may be some, slipping through the cracks and making their way to CRAs or other people who now have to monitor that as well. And so in these jurisdictions, we know as as as providers, we have to be on the lookout for some of these things and further assist, employers preventing them from seeing information they, you know, they they shouldn't see to make a hiring decision, and all of these, and we'll go into this a little bit later, really impact, the products and services that you are used to seeing traditionally in a background check. Some of the states that we're seeing, having new legislation right now up and coming, Missouri, Maryland, Texas and Kentucky, these are all actively working on their own versions of what a clean slate means, and I don't foresee, you know, a lot of the other people in the industry that, you know, we work with and follow and and track on this legislation, we don't see that, slowing down anytime soon. And again, you know, California and New York seem to both be the early adopters for a lot of these, tighter, more restrictive, rules and legislations, applications of the of these laws. So why is the pace accelerating? You know, it started really, really slow in 2021 and is really kinda catching like wildfire. You know, the court the court appeal decisions, California, have really sparked this. You know, like I said, the laws have been in place for many years and, you know, depending on the pressure from, you know, local litigation, clerks have either been really quick to jump on this, like Riverside and LA, and block that information immediately. There are a lot of jurisdictions in California that the clerks and the courts are holding out waiting to see if there's because there's multiple appeals in place, so they're trying to kind of let things roll even though they're not necessarily in compliance with the the laws. And then they also are putting in separate, processes in place to say, okay. We are in compliance with the law, but there is another another means to to get that information. There's also a huge social movement to protect privacy of individuals. You know, privacy protection you're seeing it every day, you know, every day in the news, reading about it in articles, with big social media companies, preventing access to private information. This is all really creating an environment that is rich with litigation and, movements to protect oneself from, you know, either cyber attacks or, you know, breaches of of information and really trying to lock down that information to, not only comply with these laws but also protect oneself from these types of invasions. And again courts are digitizing records quickly, moving away from traditional storage storage facilities, I know that there until recent years there were courts in you know smaller jurisdictions that were still documenting court records in books, you know they're taking the time to digitize all these records but the more records that become available electronically the higher the risk is for the owners and protectors of this data to make sure that they have it locked down that it cannot be used for information or using purposes that are not permissible or for, you know, a fraud or what what all the other, you know, all the reasons someone would want to get access to these large groups of datasets. So what does this mean for employers? And I think this really is a key point of discussion, to, you know, to dive into. There are four main ways that I think that I'm seeing when I'm interacting with customers and and when we're talking with, others in the industry, redaction of this information, really reduces not well, not so much the accuracy of a background check, but more the efficacy of a background check because if the letter of the law for the FCRA compliance means that we have to have reasonable procedures to demonstrate that a record belongs to an individual and traditionally, those familiar with the screening process, across the board the best practice is you know two solid identifiers whether it's a complete name, a complete DOB, a complete social, but once you start to run into the redaction where we're only getting year of birth or month and day of birth, Generally, criminal records don't include social. Every once in a while, you'll get the last four noted on there. Address information, even driver's numbers, are being redacted. So what this does is this really reduces the pool of data that background screeners can use to make sure that that information belongs to the individual. And not only does that become exponentially more difficult because the missing the information is missing, But when you have a situation when you've got common names in play, it just expands that in you know, because, you know, the other identifiers are how we really narrow that down to make sure that you're getting the most accurate information. And that's what that's where the real challenge comes from is, you know, the decisions like how do you how do screeners protect themselves to make sure that they're staying compliant with the FCRA following reasonable procedures and also still provide employers with substantial accurate information, complete information to make a safe hiring decision. Another area that really, is starting to impact employers, and we feel it as well as a screener, and everyone's starting to see it is turnaround times. In these jurisdictions, especially for organizations that do a lot of hiring in these clean slate or redaction jurisdictions, they're seeing significant delays in turnaround times on these reports. Whereas if we used to walk into a certain jurisdiction, I'll use Sacramento because it's right down the road for us, you could walk up to a terminal and do a a name search and walk out right there with the results. But because of this redaction, you know, thankfully, we can still push through individuals. We we do a search and there's no records found. That is something that we can can easily do. But anytime that there is a possibility of a matching of matching information, that information has to now go to the clerk. And now this the onus of this research is put on the clerk. And we're, I've been doing background screening for, like, twenty five years now, and this takes us back, you know, fifteen, twenty years ago of, you know, people waiting in line with this list with the courts waiting for them to pull records. So we're seeing significant delays, you know, multiple days, sometimes even weeks or months on these things. And as we know, you know, beyond thirty days, information is not considered fresh anymore. So it puts a really big challenge for employers of what they do, because of these extended turnarounds in these areas. So employers are really kinda having to adjust their timelines, adjust their onboarding, adjust, conversations about, you know, contingent hiring. So, you know, these are all of the the the, the downstream effects that employers are having to face from some of these clean slate and redaction issues. Alright. So, gonna hand it back over to Brian to our first poll. Excellent. Thank you, Mark. And so our first, poll for today, you'll find the poll tab, right between chat and q and a on the right side of the screen. So how would you describe your organization's current approach to background screening? We have standardized process across all locations and roles, the gold standard. Our process varies by location, hiring manager, or role. We rely primarily on a single national database. We are currently evaluating or rebuilding our screening program. So we'll give folks just a couple more seconds to fill out, the poll, and we're gonna close it out in three, two, one. Thanks for participating. Alright. Gonna go ahead and share the results. So how would you describe your organization's current approach background screening? Standardized process across across all locations and roles leading the way with 77%. Our process varies by location, hiring, or manager roles almost yeah. 6%. We rely on a single database, 8%. And, well, we are current well, I lost the last one. We're currently evaluating or rebuilding our program at 8%. So some pretty interesting information there, and I'll turn it back over to Mark. Great. Thank you, Brian. Well, based on that poll, it's, really exciting to see that, 7077% of the people have feel they have a very strong screening program, and that really is step one to keeping yourself protected and making the right decisions. I'll tag on to that by saying, you know, for those people who do have that or if you're developing it, really make sure you're revisiting that often because, things are changing very, very quickly, and I think it's a it's a good mechanism to really stay ahead of the curve on a lot of these changes. Alright. So we're gonna jump into now where some of this compliance and privacy collide. You know, it's always difficult when you've got two separate things that you have to accomplish, but there's a big wall in between. And it's really trying to define what those challenges are and kind of crossing that wall and making sure that you are, you know, doing your duty and your diligence to prevent negligent hiring, to protect your organization, to protect your brand and your employees versus protecting the, the privacy of the individual, making sure that you're following all the laws and various regulations from state to state and county to county. This becomes a pretty heavy lift, especially for, you know, small to mid sized businesses who may not have, you know, their own in house legal counsel or, you know, just, you know, trying to navigate that becomes not only a very time, you know, time consuming but very expensive, process, but it's something that has to be done because, you know, if you don't do it, you're you're putting yourself at risk for, litigation. Too little data really also in in affects that negligent hiring. Kinda looking back to what I was talking about earlier, as the number of jurisdictions expand that are redacting information, sealing information, the pool of available data to make a decision on continues to get smaller and smaller, and I know that there is a lot of work on the screener side to look at, other avenues, other options, other services available, other methods of identification to really try and, help provide, you know, some, connectivity between these records that may not have PII and the ability to use them in a hiring decision. But, you know, the base of it is is we've gotta stay compliant. Everyone's gotta stay compliant. So it's really about, balancing the risk of reporting and using that information in the hiring decision. Courts, you know, redacting this information, it really kind of it forces employers to see, you know, how can I how can I get how can I prepare ourselves to have enough information to make sure that we're hiring, you know, safely? You know, make defensible decisions. This all really goes back to making sure that you you're working on always updating your hiring your hirings hiring policies, your screening policies. And what makes it even more difficult is you may need to have jurisdictional specific policies based on your organization. And I know that another modifier there is, are you in a regulated industry? Because you may not even have control of what you can and can't say or do because the reg you know, the regulation is there to say, you cannot hire for this, this, and this. So what do you do to make sure to the best of your ability you're following those regulations if information that, say, it's a, you know, a felony conviction from a certain time frame that's been sealed, the person's had no history since, but it falls into the realm of you're unable to hire that person based on that, but you can't see it because of the jurisdiction. So there's a lot of, tension there, in trying to figure and balance that. So, you know, really navigating that from a legal perspective, really always looking at what your acceptable risk is based on your industry, trying to stay compliant, and and really it boils down to making sure that you have reasonable procedures in place that you could speak to because there is no clear safe harbor when it comes to making these hiring decisions with partial information. Alright. And then, three fault lines, and this kind of, just expands on what we're just talking about. So, employers must screen to avoid negligent hiring, and they have to make sure that they are hiring, getting enough information to follow the letter of the law to make sure that they are safe and, to not trigger privacy violations. One example of that is on here too is ban the box. So ban the box means on an application, you can't ask someone if they have a history of criminal record. But, you know, there is a tendency there for people to want to start to ask this. I know it's not a law in every state, but it's best practice not to ask. But I could see why an employer would say, if I ask this, I might get information that maybe couldn't, you know, come into court, but, you know, that puts you at risk for compliance. It's not compliance. Ban the box. You don't wanna go down that route. And then, the biggest piece, obviously, is identity verification versus PI redaction. You know, I know that there are several John Smiths. Luckily for me, there's not very many Mark Glascock in the country, but when you are when you have a pool of employees and, you know, even if you're in certain demographics or certain areas of the country, common names, do come up quite often. And those common names even have a heavier burden for, for proof, where many times you're required to have a third identifier to say, if it's a John Smith and you have a matching DOD, there are, you know, dozens of John Smiths in certain jurisdictions. We know, what's that third identifier that we historically were able to use? A full address, a driver's record, a driver's license number, etcetera. But if all that information is redacted, we can't even meet that standard. So those are, like, three of the real major challenges that these redactions and sealing of records are causing. Alright. Time minutes, Paul. Thank you, Mark. And, the audience, let me know that it's not a pop up. It's a tab, and you'll find it between chat and q and a. Let me open it up right now, and you should see poll pop in between the chat and the q and a. Thanks, Robert, for letting me know. So our next poll question is what the or excuse me. Where does your organization feel most exposed? Keeping our screening practices compliant across multiple jurisdictions, maintaining accuracy as court data becomes harder to access, balancing candidates' privacy obligations with our duty of care, and our final, option, adjudicating results consistently when data is incomplete or redacted. So take a few moments there to complete the poll number two. Where does our organization feel most exposed right now? Getting great participation on this one, probably with the improved directions there. That always helps. Alright. We're gonna wrap it up in three, two, and one. Alright. And let me share the results for you, everybody. So where does your organization feel most exposed right now? And we can really see what our colleagues are doing out there. Keeping our screening practices compliant across multiple jurisdictions at almost 18%, maintaining accuracy as court data becomes harder to access, over 25%, balancing candidate privacy obligations with our duty of care, almost 30%, and adjudicating results consistently when data is incomplete or redacted at 28%. So interesting stats, and I'll turn it back over to Mark. Great. Thank you, Brian. And, you know, these numbers don't surprise me. These are all these are all, you know, four core things that, the entire industry is trying to navigate right now. And we'll get into average action a little bit later. That adds a whole another nuance of of complexity to to hiring. So what can we do about it? Let me jump here. There we go. Okay. So how do we navigate this? What do we do? Make sure what we can do is really focus on the knowns so that those cannot come into question when the unknowns arise. So things like really make sure that you are defining the job titles, for EEO compliance. Make sure that you are not searching anything really more than you need to search per job title. Have it very, very detailed. You know, this job title has this background check. And then further from that, these are the, you know, these are the screening criteria that applies specifically to that job. Make sure that you're conducting individual assessments when you receive those results. You know, this is one of the big to dos for employers, for Clean Slate, is, you know, making sure that you're doing an individual assessment, staying away from blanket policies, basically saying things like we will not hire anyone who has a felony regardless of the outcome. Weighing, you know, make sure that you're weighing the offence type, the severity, and how how old it is, you know a lot of people like I said earlier make mistakes when they're young, so this information may still be reportable, If they've had, you know, nothing, you know, pop up, in their history since then, it may not be something that would preclude them from being hiring based on the role, so, further protect yourself by making sure you're doing an individual assessment of every single candidate based on the results of the background check. As always, make sure you're getting your, conspicuous consent and disclosure for, permission to do the background check. It's always a good idea to work with a screener who is well versed in what they do. PBS accredited firms are a great place to start. They do an amazing job not only of advocating for the industry, but also keeping everyone in line with a high standard of regulation, for screening and their policies and procedures. And then, this is where we kinda get into the to the adverse action discussion. Really make sure you're you're following the adverse action process. And I I know that, it was 18% of, of the the group said that following up with compliance, is difficult and it is. We're starting to see changes in the duties of employers in the adverse action process changing at, like, district levels. So, an example of that would be, LA County. LA County has their own adverse action set of criteria, but there is now even, as of I think it was the beginning or the end of last year beginning of last year, there are separate deeper more constrictive rules for, rural Los Angeles County. So staying ahead of those, keeping, abreast of these changes, really making sure you know where the job is, where the candidate is, and what you're just you're making your decision on, all really will help reduce the risk, in negligent hiring and also protect you, from privacy issues with, EEO, etcetera. Individual assessments, make sure you're going through the adverse action process, allowing the person time to dispute any information they feel may be incorrect, allowing for an individual to offer up a letter of explanation, you know, you know there may be information on the report that, they don't necessarily want to dispute, but something happened, they did something silly in college and they want to let the employer know, hey, here's what happened, This is, you know, here's an explanation of that. This is so long ago, and take those things into consideration as part of your individual assessment. That will all really kinda help solidify the knowns, and just kind of get them out of your mind so you could focus on when those, out of pocket situations do arise. And so what are some of the some organizations doing now, to kind of try to combat this, you know, bevy attention and, missing information and changes in compliance. So, how you can help yourself, how you can help your screeners is really do what you can if, you know, you have the ability to do so in validating who your who your applicants are. I know that fraud is on the rise, especially with AI and and, you know, making sure that who is applying for job is the actual person. But if you have the opportunity, have your recruiters, have your managers, have them look at their driver's license, make sure that is the right person. When you're collecting data, make sure you collect as much data as you need that's required for the role. Collect middle names. I know historically, middle names haven't been a a piece of information passed through to screeners, but that could be another identifier that can really lock down or, or, show that this information doesn't belong to an individual. And that could just give your screener another tool for matching. Another thing is depth of search. Traditionally, most everyone does a seven year screen. That's seven years of address history. Maybe consider doing a ten year address history because if you do that last three years, there's a possibility that a jurisdiction may pop that has usable information in the hiring decision, but is not in one of those, redacted jurisdictions. So there's an opportunity there to really, maybe expand the scope of the net a little bit by going a little bit deeper in your search. Capture driver's license information. I I personally, you know, in my day to day bring this up with clients all the time. If you have an opportunity, even if you're not, you know, really running that, capture that driver record information because that is really hard to, if you had it in your hand, it's it's very, very difficult to fake these days. It's a good place for us to have actual identifiers so we could see what the individual's true legal name is, their DOB, their driver's license number because any bit of those we have, we can use for matching. So even if we don't have a full DOB, if we happen to find a driver's record on the charge, that's something that we can put together to say, okay. This belongs to that person and now make that reportable. And then this next one is kinda near and dear to my heart. It's something that I think is up and coming. Self disclosed criminal records. Partner with screeners who offer this service. Obviously, this depends on the the individual actually disclosing their information. But if someone's really looking for a job and they feel that their background is not going to be an issue with their performance on the job, There could be some great, information discovered if you can if you have a process for them to disclose this information to your screener. And how this protects you from any sort of ban the box issues is you as the employer are not able to see this information. This is information that your screener will collect, directly and use that in the creation of the background check, validating PII, etcetera. And one little piece of, information is that also if something is disclosed and it's located during the normal course of a background, but it's missing PII, that disclosure could be used to fill that gap of missing PII and make that reportable. So it's a really cool tool. Again, you know, it depends on adoption of the, the actual people the the candidate is actually disclosing it. But when it does happen, it can be a very, very useful tool. The next thing is really build a layered strategy. I know in one of the earlier polls, there were some discussion about, doing some very light, you know, data background checks, and I know it really depends on the job, the job duties, the risk of the job, etcetera. But give yourself an opportunity to maybe do a little bit deeper background check where you're not just doing data searches. Data searches are really really gonna be impacted by these, redaction of PII, simply because the sources that all these, you know, national data sources pull from, you know, are being impacted by this. So, if you're doing that, it's a great first pass to discover jurisdictions, but then do a primary source county search. You know, that way you're, you're covering that base of going to the primary source and finding the actual information. Generally, there's more PI available in that air in that area. But also consider using federal records. A lot, a lot of people don't understand that things that appear, at the federal court don't appear at the local courts. They don't talk to each other, so there could be more information that you could find there, by simply expanding into, federal services. Really, expanding into alias names, you know, and not so much the nickname stuff. That's that can be determined through through normal, through normal processes, but really true actual alias names. So maiden names, married names, people who have, you know, when they get married, they shuffle their names where their last name becomes a middle name and they have a new last name. Collect that information. If that's provided through, that's something that can bring, you know, sometimes 15 to 20% more jurisdictions to do investigations on. Again, broadening the scope, broadening the net to find locations and information on this individual that may be under a different name in a jurisdiction that is outside of scope of some of these court redactions. And then, another really hot, topic and, I I did some research on this before I came on board. A lot of the, many of the recent job reports that are coming out are saying that employees are staying at their their jobs longer. And what this does is this builds increases the amount of time from that just pre hire once in time look at their history. So if you've got employees that have been with you five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, like, you knew what they did at that point in time when they got hired, but what what has happened since? Like, so on look at, processes, look at programs, to bring ongoing monitoring into your program. And if it's not something you wanna do at all levels, you know, look at, you know, upper management management or if you have, people who work with vulnerable persons or regulated industries, it might be a good tool for you to say, okay. We know that we can only get so much information here pre hire, but we wanna make sure that we have this ongoing look to protect not only us, the brand, but also, their their coworkers and employees. So it's a really good tool that we're seeing people start to adopt to to try and offset some of these issues that we're seeing with court redactions and clean slate. And then next is, optimize your timing. If you operate in these areas, in these jurisdictions, if you have employees or jobs in California or Maryland or any of these other states, just prepare yourself mentally, prepare your processes that your onboarding is gonna take longer. So, you know, if you've got roles to fill, really work with the HR teams, with your recruiters to set expectations. Okay. We're hiring in Michigan. We're hiring in California. We know we're gonna need probably ten to fifteen days longer than we do in other places. So having those expectations set really allows you to stay in front of your hiring. It really gives you an edge on, you know, just having more control of the process. I know that we get a a lot of reach outs from, from, from employers saying, you know, why is this taking so long? Where is this search out? But in these areas, you know, just know it's it's gonna take longer because we're going to clerks. The clerks are having to pull this information to find that, those details and get those back to you. And then again, you know, PBSA accreditation goes a long way. These these screeners, are very aware of, how to reduce and mitigate risk for you by not providing you information that you can't make a hiring decision on. It's really a an integral part of a of a cohesive screening, program is, you know, having the right partner, in play. And then formalize your adjudication policy. This one is, and I'm not sure how many people are very familiar with this, but, this is probably one of the most most litigious portions of the background check process, is make sure that you have very clean policies on what will trigger adverse action on an individual for that job after the individual assessment. So, again, make sure you're assessing the individual for the job role. Does the information that comes back preclude them from doing that job role? Like, if it's a driving role and they have multiple DUIs, have in your policies and procedures, DUI for this role will preclude them from being hiring. Allow them the time to dispute information. Make sure that you've got clear processes in place for if that information is updated, whether or not it's updated to you know, it was originally a felony, but now it's a misdemeanor because the clerk didn't update the information. How have your policies be as detailed okay. This has to be reviewed again for adverse action. Does this now meet the criteria? And then always provide like I said, always provide candidates the opportunity to share with you, any sort of explanation about what it is. Like, there may be candidates that you really, really wanna hire, but they have something in their history. A conversation can go a long way. Learning about the the circumstances surrounding that situation, can really not only give you insight on the character of the individual, but also set your mind at ease that you're not putting your company at risk, you're not putting your employees at risk, based on that discussion with that individual. And so where does that leave us? The tension's real. This is stuff that's happening now. Employers are really, faced with making some decisions based on, you know, less information, ever changing environment on, compliance. The gap is widening. There are more and more code courts we're seeing, year over year adding to the mix, making it more difficult or impossible, to get information to their courts to match information to match to the, applicants. And, you know, really is the the time to act now before this gets even further down the road. There's enough information out there for existing jurisdictions to see how they operate, that you can take into account when reviewing your processes. It's just it's a good time now to kind of really dig in and make sure that, you are set up for success. You are working with the correct partner, and you're asking the right questions. Are we prepared when these situations arise in our screening program? And then I'll jump in here. We have about sixteen minutes left in our program, and, this is the portion of the presentation, where if you've identified some areas where you think that improvement could help, we're here to help you along with that because complexity is the problem and clarity is the answer, and getting ahead of these shifts starts with understanding where your process is. This is not about disruption. It's about understanding operational complexity, identifying where reinforcement might be needed, and getting clarity, before complexity creates pressure specifically in an audit or something like that. So what comes next? And with Mitratech, we can help you turn that, awareness into clarity. If you're interested in exploring your background screening process and identifying where your strengths are or potentially where your weaknesses are, we can help you with that process. And so we offer a background screening readiness walk through, a thirty minute guided conversation designed to help you clearly articulate your current background screening process, identify where complexity may require some stronger structure, and, align your hiring velocity with, compliance confidence. So this conversation, it's not a demo. It's not a sales pitch. It's just a a free offering for you to pressure test your system, talk with an expert, and really explore potentially where, you might see some benefit. So with that, I'm gonna launch another poll. If you're interested in participating, in scheduling a readiness walk through, you can, let us know in the poll tab in between the chat and QA. Would you like a thirty minute background screening readiness walk through? Would it be helpful for your team? Yes. We'd value the conversation is option a. Option b, possibly, I'd like more information. We'll follow-up with you and contact you and provide more information. Or, c, feeling confident of what you got going on and not at that's not at this time. So go ahead and, identify that. We'll give you another minute or two. And after this, there will be a survey that'll be launching at, ten minutes till the hour. So you can, go ahead and let us know what you thought of today's session. And, I'm gonna close out the poll, and then we'll jump into the q and a. So we'll go ahead and close that out. I thank you for participating in that poll. And I guess we could start out with our first question that's come in. Let's see here. Okay. I don't know if you want. me to read these off, Mark, or do you want to just fill them in the question tab? I'm happy to read them off if you like. Yeah. Go ahead and read them out for me, Alright. You got it. please. Some of our government contracts require our employees do not have a criminal history. How do we balance that need with Ban the Box requirements? That's a great question, and that rolls into that, you know, those industries that have special requirements. How you can really protect yourself is make sure that you've got everything documented, that you are doing as deep and diligent of a screen as possible. You know, where you're gonna be protected and and mitigate your risk is you can demonstrate that you have reasonable procedures to locate as much of the information you can that they require you to find. And then, you know, the ban the box, protecting yourself from that, I really feel is working with a partner who offers that, the self disclosure option, giving individuals a chance to, you know, share that information with the screener, so that they have the information to try and go find that. But it is it is a it is a a thin line to to to walk, but really comes down to just having your policies very well documented and your, reasonable procedures in place. That's where you're gonna find a little bit of a of a safety net. Okay. Great. Do these changes meaning I mean that employers will no longer receive date of birth, Social Security number, etcetera, on the background check results, or employers can't request that information to run a background check? So a little clarity on the redactions. Sure. So this specifically is talking about the information available to screeners to validate, court records on individuals. So you are able you are still able to collect, information on the individual. We still, as a screener, screeners are still able to use that to request these investigations with courts and other jurisdictions. Where the redaction is occurring is actually on the record itself. So, historically, we, you know, we could have someone walk into the PAT public access terminal at a court, search up a name, and it would have, you know, name, DOB, case number, etcetera. But now that DOB isn't there. So if it's a name with a court record, we now have to go to the clerk to get that information. So, you can still collect it. It can still be used in the process. If it comes back to the screener and the screener is able to validate that it belongs to it, that information is still included with the background check report. Okay. This question from, many of these points seem like they are based on state legislation and laws. Is there any current federal requirements surrounding PII and case So, the Fed? seems to be allowing the states to regulate this, in their own way. Federal courts have had PII redaction in place for decades. Federal records, you know, they're they're basically redacting most PII at the time of the completion of a record, so that's been in place for a long time. The states really are owning, the the laws and legislations as even down to, again, like I mentioned, county and local district levels are setting their own rules about how they're interpreting these laws for PI protection. Okay. Got a question coming in from Massachusetts. We run a national background check as it relates to addresses from seven years. Any times these national background results don't show hits that Massachusetts quarry shows, we are a youth serving organization. Yeah. So that really is, you know, talking about, you know, the depth of your background checks. So, the the ICORI in Massachusetts is a very complete, dataset with the state police. You know, in California, isn't one you can fortunately do that. There is no California statewide available, but, many of these other states do have a statewide source like Massachusetts, like Michigan, that as of as of right now, those datasets don't fall under the purview of the legislation that's been passed about redaction. It's very specifically talking about data at the court level. So since most of these or many of these state sources like I Cori and others are housed by the state police, they don't fall under the purview of those redactions. So that's a good place to really expand the depth of your background checks to include statewide searches where available. Yes. There's more cost. Most of those states have additional state fees. But when you're talking about risk mitigation, it's probably worth the value. Okay. It sounds like we can legally pick and choose which positions require a background check then. I'm assuming, yes, I would verify with your legal counsel, but, you know, it's it's very common for different levels of roles or different roles to have different background check packages. You know, if you've got someone who is handling money or has access to PII or vulnerable persons, they're gonna have a, ideally, a more in-depth background check than, maybe you've got someone who just, like, works at front desk or or something. Me living in the screening world, I think the, I think that every role, is, benefits from having a background check. Where you wanna make sure that you're being, compliant is make sure that you're running the same background check for that job role and everybody. So if you've got a a front desk clerk, every front desk clerk gets the same background check. But there is as as far as I know, there's no law that says you've gotta do the same background check on anybody. But, definitely, that's where it comes to know what the role is, know what the risk is for every role, know what, you know, what level of screen that you want to do because I you know, personally, I've been like I said, I've been doing this forever. I think screening is a community service. It really helps protect, the public, and gives employers kind of peace of mind. But, yeah, I would always recommend earning a background check on all roles. Okay. Is there and we'll probably be wrapping this up one or two more questions. Is there a specific guideline for FDIC section 19 as it pertains to applicant credit slash adverse action threshold? So that is, that is becoming another hot topic. New York just really, you know, opened the door to that where it's becoming a smaller and smaller window of usability for credit reports and hiring. So much so New York, if you, look up some of the regulations there, you now basically have to say, you know, this specific job role requires the use of a credit report and pre and pre hire because of this reason, and there has to be there's, like, a test, to make sure that that role meets the requirements. And this is something I think that's gonna really, you know, move across the country rather quickly is the ability to use credit reports generally in, pre employment skiing screening. There's gonna be very, particular criteria, that limits the down to the job role where you can use credit information in hiring. Okay. And then our final question for today, we do everify as well as criminal check. Does everify ease some of, these issues? E Verify is a great tool to make sure that the person is who they say they are. Where that kind of comes into play is E Verify usually happens after the screening. So, and there's not a lot of correlation between the two. What it could do is it gives you an opportunity to say, look at the results of the the E Verify and say, this name doesn't match the name we did the background check on and and give you the opportunity to say, hey. I should go look into this. So, great tools to use together. Are they really connected? Not so much. Okay. Very well. Any final thoughts for our, audience? No. I I really appreciate the attendance. Really take the time to look at your again, you know, cover your bases, make sure that you're set up for success, review your screening policies frequently, and really find a partner who's gonna help you stay ahead of the curve on this ever changing climate of compliance Well, thank you, Mark. We really appreciate your time today and sharing this great information with us. the And if you enjoyed this webinar and found it informative, country. join us on June 3, and Mark will continue our background screening thought leadership series with the part of background screening compliance that falls on you. So, register now. I put, the link multiple times in the chat. You can register. If you're not available on June 3, still register because you can get the recording after we complete the live session. So with that, I thank you for joining us, and, we appreciate your participation participation today. Have a great day. Goodbye.