EEOC Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2013-2016 will focus on
eliminating barriers in hiring/recruitment including review of blanket review
of criminal background checks and credit history.
Should employers still conduct criminal background and credit checks?
In what situations are such backgroundchecks ill advised?
Question: How will trucking
companies avoid EEOC complaint that DAC criminal background checks don’t have
disparate impact on certain groups?
The following was reported Lana
Batts and Billie Lee in Transport Topics a few weeks ago. I have condensed the article into the salient comments.
We have alerting carriers to ever-changing legal trends
in the background-screening industry.
Specifically, we have been notifying them of the changes brought about
by recent Federal Trade Commission Fines Levied for Violations of the Fair
Credit Reporting Act, a class-action lawsuit that has been settled covering the
same issues.
The issues fall into two categories:
·
The pitfalls in using commercial
databases exclusively for criminal history record checks.
·
The need to allow potential employees to
rectify incorrect information and explain why a past conviction is not relevant
to the current job offering.
By their very nature, database searches represent a
single snapshot in time. “National”
databases information is a guarantee of receiving only partial information – at
best – and therein lies the danger of errors that may result in costly civil
litigation.
The question that courts and the EEOC are beginning to
ask is, “How can one rely on a product with known significant deficiencies such
as the ‘national’ database standing alone and still pretend be in compliance
with FCRA?
The EEOC’s new guidelines are all about explanation, or
individual assessment –i.e., allowing the candidate to explain the
circumstances in the record and what has happened since the conviction.
The EEOC provides guidance regarding the factors that
should be considered and requires and individual assessment of these factors
before a final hiring decision is made.
As with the FCRA process, there are clear steps in providing notice and
gathering required information.
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