Subsequently spending several years on a waiting list for a subsidized apartment in Tennessee, "Jack" says he was turned away by a leasing amanuensis when wrong information turned upward in a routine groundwork check.

"She'southward like, 'Y'all have a sexual practice offender charge on your record,' and I was shocked," says Jack, who requested that we non use his real name to avoid having it further associated with the erroneous allegation. "I never have been charged with that."

The agent showed Jack a copy of the report, which referred to a homo with a like name and birthdate, he says. The study also included a photo of the alleged sexual activity offender, who the leasing agent acknowledged clearly wasn't him. (Amid other things, the human pictured had conspicuous face tattoos.)

But Jack still lost his spot on the waitlist—he's currently staying with a relative—and had a separate housing awarding likewise declined considering of the mistaken data. As he tries to correct the record and clear up the defoliation, every day is a new day of limbo.

Vidhi Joshi, an attorney at the Legal Aid Gild of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands who is representing Jack, filed a formal dispute with the screening company that included the alleged offender's movie only hasn't however received a response. She has likewise requested a copy of the report used for the second rental application, which was issued by a different background cheque firm, she says. (Joshi declined to identify the firms involved, since their responses are still pending).

Jack's story is just one of what off-white credit advocates say is a growing number of cases where wrong data on criminal and other groundwork checks is making it difficult for innocent people to detect work and housing. Such checks are routinely required for employment and rental applications, and conducted with varying levels of diligence by hundreds of companies around the country, merely they only piece of work properly when the information they contain is accurate.

And, increasingly, that's not the case.

"Nosotros have gone from dorsum in the early on role of the century seeing a couple hundred [cases] about criminal records a twelvemonth up to more than a thousand a year," says Sharon Dietrich, litigation manager at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia and caput of the legal aid group's employment unit of measurement.

Digitizing data similar court records has fabricated background checks significantly cheaper and faster than in years gone past: In 2012, a Society for Human Resource Management survey found that more ii-thirds of organizations polled conducted criminal background checks on job candidates.

"I retrieve employers are scared not to practice it because they feel like they may be plant liable for negligent hiring," says Dietrich.

But regulation has not necessarily kept pace. Even some jurisdictions that have passed so-called "ban the box" legislation, which forbids employers from requiring potential hires to indicate on job applications whether they've been convicted of a law-breaking, still allow criminal history checks later on in the awarding process.

Companies typically employ a tertiary-party groundwork screening service to verify the work and didactics histories of potential hires, and often to cheque a candidate'southward credit history and search for any criminal convictions that might serve as a ruby flag, says Mike Aitken, vice president of regime affairs at SHRM.

According to a May report from business intelligence firm IBISWorld, the $2 billion background check industry is mostly composed of small-scale, local firms, which have benefited from easy internet admission to more than and more than public records. Fear of liability for employee misconduct and mail-ix/eleven security concerns have besides contributed to rapid growth in the manufacture in recent years, according to the National Association of Professional Background Screeners, an industry grouping which counts more 850 background screening companies as members.

And while the majority of checks are likely accurate, Dietrich says she'due south seen a "good number" of cases where background reports include data virtually people with similar names to her clients. In 1 case, she says, a client with a common name received a report with 65 pages of criminal history data about unrelated people with like names.

"I have fifty-fifty seen cases where a female's record is attributed to a male or vice versa, merely because they don't use gender information, fifty-fifty though they have it," she says.

The Devil In The Details

Even job applicants who do take criminal histories tin can still be unfairly harmed past slipshod background checks. Oftentimes, convictions legally expunged by a court nevertheless prove up on reports. Crimes can also be misclassified, such as when misdemeanors are erroneously labeled as felonies, Dietrich says.

1 problem is over-reliance on commercial databases, which tin contain incomplete information or return hits based on false matches, says Larry Lambeth, the president of screening firm Employment Screening Services.

Lambeth is also the founder of Concerned CRAs, an association of consumer reporting agencies, as screening companies are known under federal law, voluntarily adhering to certain upstanding standards. The group requires its members to consult original documents, like court records, and compare information like birthdates and addresses to verify information from databases actually corresponds to the subject of a groundwork bank check.

"If you use a database for his criminal records, if you find a hit, nosotros require that you pull a criminal record from the courthouse and find the identifiers and ensure it's the right person," he says.

But not all groundwork screeners conduct such rigorous research, and not all clients are willing to pay for information technology, he says. And fifty-fifty well-intentioned screeners tin accept difficulty verifying records in jurisdictions where privacy-minded courts redact personal information like addresses and dates of birth, says Melissa Sorenson, executive director of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners.

"It's extending the time frame of getting people to work," she says, since information technology takes screeners longer to complete reports for employers. The organization generally tries to work with country and local regulators to make sure background screeners have access to the data they need to practise their jobs, she says.

Under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Human activity, applicants do have the legal right to receive copies of their background checks and to contest any inaccuracies with the agencies that did the screening. But in exercise, critics say the process can be backbreaking even for experts, let alone for individuals looking to right their own records. Dietrich says she'south had a screening firm resist providing her with an accost to send mail on behalf of a client.

"Y'all have to know even where to look—await for a little link at the bottom [of a firm's website] that says 'consumers,' and possibly that's where you'll find the dispute procedures," says Dietrich. And those procedures often require documentation like proof of address that not everyone tin hands provide, she says.

"Some people can do that, some people can't, particularly my clients who tend to be low-income and on the move," she says.

Even in cases where data is obtained directly from government sources, it can still exist incorrect or out of date: One-time U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, now a partner at law firm Covington & Burling, wrote messages on behalf of Uber to local legislators earlier this year, urging them non to require ride-hailing services to vet their drivers against the Federal Agency of Investigation'south fingerprint database.

Critics have long said that the FBI database, which many states use to vet childcare workers, wellness care professionals, and others in regulated occupations, oftentimes contains wrong, misleading, or incomplete information. The database contains arrest records from law enforcement agencies around the country but only includes final case result information roughly half the time, co-ordinate to a 2013 report from the National Employment Law Project. That means that arrests that resulted in an acquittal, dropped charges, or fifty-fifty expunged records can essentially announced every bit unresolved.

And updating outdated or simply incorrect data in the FBI's files tin be laborious and can leave jobseekers out of work while they reach out to multiple agencies to become the information stock-still, says Maurice Emsellem, manager of the NELP's Access and Opportunity Program.

"Basically, you take to go dorsum to the state that created the tape to get it fixed," he says. "The FBI won't fix it in the FBI organization."

And while reforms to the FBI background check organisation have been proposed as office of bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation, they've withal to make it through Congress.

Nor, says Dietrich, have regulators addressed issues that have arisen effectually private groundwork checks in the more than 45 years since the Fair Credit Reporting Human activity became law, such as how groundwork screeners should handle tape matching bug in computerized databases or how they should deal with potentially expunged cases.

"The world of regulation of these companies is not what it might be," she says.

Meanwhile, the promise of future regulation is cold comfort for home-seekers similar Jack, whose lives are being immediately damaged by bad data in a information-obsessed globe. "He has suffered from homelessness," Joshi says. "Information technology's had a pretty big impact."