RELIABLE BACKGROUND SCREENING INDUSTRY NEWS AND ARTICLES

Earlier this month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued its report on the three nationwide consumer reporting agencies (NCRAs)—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, the three main credit bureaus in the United States.  The CFPB is required by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to provide an annual report that summarizes the outcomes of consumer complaints lodged with the CFPB against these three credit reporting companies. The report was based upon 488,000 consumer complaints that the CFPB received from October 2021 through September 2022, regarding Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.  It showed some improvement in the response by the credit bureaus relative to their [...]

Sadly in the news this month was the death of a 7-year-old girl, allegedly killed by a FedEx delivery person/driver, who was in fact a subcontractor working for a third-party company.  The result has been a lawsuit filed by the family of the deceased girl against both FedEx and the third-party subcontracting company (that actually employed this delivery person/driver). Although the lawsuit has not yet been adjudicated, it is a  reminder that companies can be held liable for the actions of their employees as well as their sub-contractors.  When a company hires a sub-contractor, the hired individual is representing the company.  It [...]

On November 15th, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued two separate reports on tenant background checks and their wide-spread use by the rental housing industry.  In addition to questioning to what extent these reports actually aid landlords to mitigate risk, the CFPB found other areas that need amelioration, including with the manner in which the multi-family industry operates today. As someone who has been involved with the apartment industry for three decades, it is not surprising.  The multi-housing industry has too often been predisposed to wanting fast, low-cost tenant screening reports, or in the politically correct vernacular of this industry, resident [...]

Regardless of your politics, most people want their personal privacy protected. California Governor Newsom cited, “an individual’s constitutional right to privacy,” in his letter to the California State Senate, when he returned California Senate Bill 1262 (SB-1262), without his signature, effectively allowing the bill to die. SB-1262 would have returned Dates of Birth (DOB’s) to publicly accessible court criminal index terminals.  This Bill would have had the effect of overturning a 2021 California Appeals Court decision which had the detrimental consequences of removing DOB’s from these indexes.  The negative impact of no DOB is because criminal records typically have no social security [...]