An old client asked us to verify a young existing employee who was being promoted and transferred within the company. This employee was asked to update her vital information on a request form. On the form she indicated that she had a PhD in international human resources from the University of Oxford-THE Oxford in the UK. The employer thought it strange that she didn’t mention that when she applied for a $7-an-hour advertising sales job two years earlier. The customer asked us to check it.

They faxed me the information and I took a look at the application and within seconds I knew the applicant was lying. I called the customer and told him I would save him the price of an international check, “I know he’s lying.” I said. “How can you know?” they asked. “Because you said you attended Lady Margaret Hall (college) in Oxford and you misspelled Margaret. Anyone with a PhD from Oxford wouldn’t misspell the name of the university. Of course we went through the steps and called Oxford and found out that LMH “Doesn’t offer HR degrees. He should have picked another college in Oxford to lie about. Think of this one. He already got promoted and still lied.”

The Ugandan Nanny

This happened recently. A woman from New York called and asked if we could run a criminal check on a Ugandan man she was planning to hire as a babysitter for her baby. I asked him, “Why?” She asked me what she meant by why? I said, “Why the hell would you hire someone from a place where the rule of law doesn’t exist, where any criminal check you can get isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, and where this person is from a region of the world that is “What are you thinking?” I asked her. I was being polite. I really thought she was crazy. reason. I had the feeling that I was the first sensible and practical person she had ever talked to on the subject. I should have charged him for parental advice instead of criminal control, but hey, I’m a good guy.

The pool digger

A colleague at a local pool company ordered a check on an employee he had already hired and went to work digging pools with a backhoe. At the time, our office was in Temecula, California, and the new hire was digging pools in Palm Springs, which is about two hours away. It took him a couple of days to get handsearch records from Utah, where the worker had previously lived, and to our amazement, the employee was wanted for escaping from jail in a rural Utah county. He was also a registered sex offender in Utah. It’s important to note that this happened in 1995, before we used the Internet. Everything was done by phone and fax and it was much slower.

I called the client right away with the great news. Now, normally, we provide the information and it is the customer’s responsibility to act accordingly. In this case, I offered to find out what the client should do with this “dangerous” employee. I asked an assistant of mine if her husband, who was a Riverside County sheriff’s deputy, could drive to Palm Springs and arrest him. We discovered that it doesn’t work that way. They have to serve a court order from the Utah jurisdiction and that could take days. I thought the officer might get “extra credit” or something for arresting a wanted bad guy. I guess I watch too much TV.

I called the district attorney’s office for that county in Utah, but there was no response to my call. So I called the Sheriff’s office in that county and spoke to the Sheriff. (Think Andy from Mayberry here.) I told him I called the district attorney’s office, but there was no answer. He told me that they were all fishing. I asked him if he knew the pool digger and he said yes. I said, “Well, come get him. He’s in Palm Springs. I’ll give you the address.” To which he replied, “We don’t want him. If he’s in Palm Springs, he won’t bother anyone here.” “You can’t do that,” I told him. “Hell, I can’t,” he said. He then proceeded to tell me that they were a small county and extradition would require a mountain of paperwork (which I wasn’t willing to do), then they would have to send someone to California to pick up the prisoner, transport his I’m so sorry back to Utah , then the county would have to pay to keep him in jail for years to come. In fact, he was doing the county a huge favor and saving them a ton of money by not hiring him.

Meanwhile, my client, the pool company, is in a panic. Remember this is before we were on the internet. I got phone support and found the only bail bondsman in Utah county. I called and asked if they were looking for this pool digger. They were. The bail bondsman in Utah asked for the address where the pool digger worked and said, “We’ll have some guys pick you up in about 2 hours.”

I can’t tell you how many times the above story has been instructive for me. It is the epitome of government vs. private sector. The government moves with icy slowness at great cost with mountains of paperwork, while the private sector does the job better, faster and cheaper.

the wanted killer

We did a criminal check for a client who was hiring dozens of people per month. The client operated a call center and we quickly learned that for some reason, telemarketers have a disproportionate amount of criminal histories compared to the general population. Imagine that.

The record came back for an applicant we were reviewing and lo and behold, the person was wanted in Los Angeles County for murder. I called the client right away to let her know. She said that it was strange that she called at that time because he, the applicant, was waiting in the outer office to see her. She was really scared.

I called the police in her town and explained the situation and they told me to tell the client that it would take a while to process the order; to entertain him and let him go to his house, thinking that in a couple of days he would start work and that they would arrest him at his house on the weekend so as not to endanger anyone in the client’s office. By the way; the police had to ask me for the man’s address so they could go and arrest him.

the ballistic nurse

This happened on the day of the bloody glove at the OJ Simpson trial, June 15, 1995, a day I will always remember.

We were doing a background check on a nurse at a hospital in southern California. The Los Angeles County Superior Court sent us incorrect criminal information about the criminal search. They did a name search, but did not match a date of birth or Social Security number, and reported that the subject of our criminal check was a drug-dealing prostitute who had multiple arrests and convictions. We later reported this incorrect information to our client. (FYI: This is the only documented case of my company making a mistake on a criminal history report.) When the aspiring nurse’s job offer was rescinded, she was furious. The client later told me that she was yelling, ranting, raving, cursing and threatening to sue everyone.

We immediately re-investigated the logs and quickly found the error. Still, although we were wrong, the client did not want to hire the nurse. She had shown her “true colors” by ranting, raving, and yelling. Security had escorted her out and, in no uncertain terms, they didn’t want her in the hospital anymore. The client asked us if there wasn’t anything else we could find to give them the legal terms to rescind her offer of employment. We dug a little deeper and discovered that she had, in fact, expanded her employment record to cover a 90 day job at another hospital where she was laid off from her. Because she lied by omission in her application, her offer was rescinded.

Timbuktu

Let me first say that I have always wanted to do a background check in Timbuktu just so I can honestly say that we have screened people everywhere from Temecula to Timbuktu. This happened just a couple of weeks ago and prompted the writing of this article. A gentleman emailed and asked if we could investigate a person and his company in Timbuktu, Mali, West Africa.

If you’re not familiar with Timbuktu, it’s a real place on the southwestern edge of the Sahara desert and surely one of the most remote places on earth. Think of the desert outpost of the French Foreign Legion with caravans of camels passing by. I read somewhere that it recently boasted 400 phones and 2 internet lines. wow!

I told the client that since we have never done anything in Mali, he would have to check and see what is available and how long it would take etc. I am one of the few experts in the US on international background checks. People contact me all the time asking how to get records from faraway places. When even I can’t figure out how to get records from somewhere, I call the local US embassy in that country. We can usually work things out from there.

I can’t say anything more specific about this case, but I can say that amazingly we were able to get quality information quickly and uncovered another internet scam from West Africa involving gold dust and probably saved the customer tens of thousands of dollars.

Client Good Looke One ordered a credit and criminal check on each new hire. We verified a new employee and about a month later, that employee called me and told me that she was the new Director of Human Resources. She was going over the policies and procedures and wanted to ask me about the background check. She asked me if it was worth the cost of doing a credit report and “What can you really say about a credit report?”

I said, “Let me tell you about yourself.” She was doing this purely from memory of his report a month earlier. He said, “He’s single, about 31 years old, a college graduate, originally from New England, lives in a rented condo, drives a modestly priced Toyota or Nissan, and is single and attractive.” She said, “Wait a minute, how can you know all that? I explained that most of it was an educated guess on my part, but I didn’t see my spouse listed, I saw student loans, a social security number that started with 1, auto loans. and the numbers on her address told me that she lived in a condominium. “What about the hot part?” She asked her, “There’s no way you can tell that from a credit report.” I said I noticed that she had a credit card with a $1000 line of credit at Victoria’s Secret and I know that as a general rule ugly women don’t shop there, therefore you must be handsome.