We learn some more things. Bob has prior police records in Florida, where he’s from.
So they didn't even do a background check before hiring "Bob"? For a position where he would have access to systems that handled financial data? That's just grossly incompetent, in my book. I've worked for 5-man startups and Fortune 500 companies. In every case, the offer letter has stated that the offer is conditional on the successful completion of a background check, and none of the positions I've held have been remotely as sensitive as the position that Bob was hired for.
That's sort of boilerplate though, isn't it? They reserve the right to do all sorts of terrible shit, but because most of that shit costs money they don't actually do it.
There are few positions that merit a hiring background check more than ones directly involving the financial transactions of a company. Even if it costs a lot of money, it is absolutely money well spent.
Criminal background checks are actually surprisingly hard to do. There are cheap ones that will search a subset, but doing it thoroughly actually requires physically going to courthouses in the county for all prior addresses. Even then, you can miss records if they are in counties where the person doesn't live.
This surprises me about America. Other countries have national criminal record databases. Is it that America hasn't spent the money to build one, or that counties/states/police stations don't want to share information, or that they're not allowed to share information?
But access to those databases is not necessarily available to all. In the UK we have the 'Disclosure and Barring Service' (which used to be the 'Criminal Records Bureau', but there are now a bunch of non crime (or non conviction) reasons you might be on the barred list) which will perform a background check which discloses any convictions and any allegations of sexual abuse. All this for the bargain price of £59.
As that last suggests, however, only certain roles are eligible for the checks, those being primarily roles that involve working with children or vulnerable adults, though the full list [0] is quite interesting.
Last I checked you're out about a grand for a semi-decent background check, one that would possibly have turned this up. Compared to the total cost of hiring someone that's peanuts.
They do. At least, my latest position involved submitting my employment data for the past seven years to a firm that conducted background checks. Again, this was for a position that was several layers removed from any kind of direct access to customer data or financial data.
