Pre Employment Screening Articles

No business is immune, including yours. But you can try to see that it doesn’t happen at your company by following these tips from Virginia certified public accountants:

Rotate your personnel. At regular or periodic intervals, perhaps every six months depending upon the nature of the business, switch the people who handle the money, suggested Richmond CPA Andrew Lakoff.

The person could be an accounting clerk, somebody in the back office who normally handles customer payments. She could be switched with someone who handles customer collections or someone from a different department of the company.

The benefits are twofold, Lakoff said: It’s a way of cross- training employees to work in different areas of the company, and it provides a fresh pair of eyes to see what the previous person has been doing.

Just don’t have the same person always doing the same function if you’re fraud-conscious, Lakoff advised.

Say a bookkeeper is employed for 20 years in the same spot with nobody going behind him checking his work. Then he goes out on sick leave and all kinds of irregularities are discovered. He may have been stealing for years.

Break up accounting duties. Do you depend on one person to open mail, process payments, make bank deposits, pay invoices, handle petty cash and reconcile bank statements?

If you have adequate staff, it may be better to divide those responsibilities, the Virginia Society of CPAs said. That way, no one person controls all of your financial activity.

Turn on your software program’s audit trail. Intuit’s QuickBooks and other accounting software has the feature, Lakoff said. It tracks all activity, including when bookkeeping entries are altered or deleted. It provides the user’s name, date and time of changes.

Say an entry for $1,000 was changed to $100. An audit trail will show who made the change and when.

Some software can be set up to automatically send reports to the owners’ computer, a good feature because running a business is immensely time-consuming. Audit trails are useless if no one reviews them.

Have bank statements mailed to your home or a post office box. That way, you get to review them before your bookkeeper does.

Look out for checks written to suppliers or others whom you don’t know, or those made out to a third party but endorsed by someone in your company. Also look for missing checks.

Say a check is made out to “Office Supply Inc.,” said CPA firm owner Sharon Hart of Barcalow & Hart PLLC in Glen Allen. But the signature on the back is that of an employee in your company. That’s who got the money. There’s something kaflooey going on.

Question gaps in check numbers. Are 10 checks missing? Are checks voided? Some people void checks in the accounting system, then falsify them for fraudulent use, Hart said.

Arrange for surprise audits. Bring in a CPA once a year at different times to conduct a surprise audit of your company’s financial records. Knowing one may occur at any time can be a deterrent.

Screen potential hires thoroughly. Check past employment, personal and professional references and criminal records. Ask your trade association or a fellow entrepreneur for the name of a reputable service, or search online using the keywords “criminal background checks [your] county.”

Create a no-tolerance culture. Communicate to every worker what sort of activities constitute fraud and what will happen to those committing it. Consider setting up a third-party hot line for workers to report suspicious activity.

Watch for other red flags. Among them: You ask to see certain reports, but your finance person fumbles around and can’t seem to come up with them. Or, one person does everything from billing to collections to disbursements, but no one is overseeing the activity.

“The owner’s involvement is critical,” Hart said. “It really makes a difference.”

© (C) 2007 Richmond Times-Dispatch. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved

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 Who’s been naughty and is likely to end up with a stocking full of coal?It might just be Santa Claus or Kris Kringle.

Public records show that nationally, someone named Santa Claus has been convicted at least a dozen times during the past decade.

Mr. Claus’ indiscretions include a 1996 arrest for driving while intoxicated in Jefferson County, Texas.

And Mr. Kringle has a lengthy criminal record in Oregon.

Even the Christmas crew appears to have had some troubles: Rudolph Reindeer violated a restraining order in 2004.

But don’t plug the chimney and forgo the cookies and milk just yet.

Skilled backgrounders know that you can’t just put someone on the naughty list based on a name. Many people have the same name, but other information would distinguish them – such as their date of birth or home address.

Unless Santa has a summer home in Beaumont, it’s unlikely the Texas drunken driver with the same name is the Santa Claus. None had an address at the actual North Pole, according to public records. But several residents of North Pole, Alaska, have criminal records.

And yes, in Virginia there is a Santa Claus. In fact, there are at least four – two of whom are women. But no public records showed criminal records for those Clauses.

Birth dates also can distinguish individuals in background checks. All of the Clauses and Kringles with criminal records were born in the 1900s. It has been published widely that the Santa Claus was around before that.

While this topic may seem like a frivolous excuse for a writer to combine public records and the holiday season, it’s not all fun and games.

Backgrounding Santa is not unusual. Companies frequently run background checks on the individuals they hire to stand in for the famous North Pole gift-giver, particularly in cases where they interact with children.

Police in some areas of England this year asked organizations that employ “Father Christmas, elves and other festive characters” to run background checks, according to British news reports.

The same techniques I used to check on Mr. Claus can be used to check up on other people in your life.

If your search turns up no records, you’re not necessarily in the clear; the records are incomplete because the agency relies on whatever information the counties provide. According to DPS, for example, Dallas County reported 78 percent of its 2004 criminal conviction records to the state, which is a marked improvement from just a few years ago. Denton County did better by reporting 82 percent of its records.

 Source: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-citwatch_12pro.ART.State.Edition1.369feeb.html

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Many people wonder what the deal is with ridiculous spam messages such as these:

F A S T T R A C K D E G R E E P R O G R A M Obtain the degree you
deserve, based on your present knowledge and life experience. A prosperous future, money earning power, and the Admiration of all. Degrees from an Established, Prestigious, Leading Institution. Your Degree will show exactly what you really can do. Get the Job, Promotion, Business Opportunity and Social Advancement you Desire! Eliminates classrooms and traveling. Achieve your Bachelors, Masters, MBA, or PhDin the field of your expertise Professional and affordable Call now - your Graduation is a phone call away. Please call: 1-206-888-2083       

This is what’s referred to as “Diploma Mill” spam. If it sounds shady, that’s because it is. In fact it’s 100% illegal to sell fake diplomas, and more importantly it’s a crime to represent yourself as having earned such a degree when applying for work.

The spam operation works like this:

- A sponsor handles the printing and shipping of the fake diplomas.
- Sponsor contacts spammers / mailers in the hopes of drumming up leads
- Spammer sends a message to millions of recipients (who probably, like me, don’t want them)
- Inevitably one or two of them call the number, which is a voicemail prompt which reads as follows (for the number above, anyway - it varies):

Thank you for calling the university degree program. After the tone, please leave your name and two telephone numbers. One where you can be reached during the daytime hours and one for evenings.

Please do speak clearly after the tone. One of the registrars will be in touch with you shortly. Thank you and have a nice day.

From there, the spammer provides your voicemail response to the diploma sponsor. Lately that process has become a bit more labor intensive for the spammer, since (of course) so many people DON’T want to be contacted regarding this so-called “offer.” As a result, several angry recipients of these emails have left voicemails in the hopes of tracking down who is behind them. This leads to issues for the spammer, who previously used to just hand over the voicemails only to be told by a pissed-off diploma sponsor that 4 out of 5 of the calls were angry complaints, or legitimate sounding responses that led to an angry person at the other end of the phone when it came time to reel them in.

So now the spammers have to filter out the complainers from the legitimate people who want to illegally purchase their fake diplomas.

You’ll notice that they word the voicemail in such a way as to indicate that you’re undergoing some University-style admissions process. In reality this is, as one might expect, a purely commercial process. You want the piece of paper. They want your money. No background check takes place. No school transcripts of any sort are required. All you need is a credit card and an address to ship the phony diploma to. And you’re done.

The hazards involved with this flatly illegal practice should be obvious to anyone. Would you trust any new doctor with a diploma on their wall if you were aware that any percentage of real people actively spend their money on these documents? Would you trust a new hire in any field if they presented you with this document as evidence of their expertise? Would you trust a contractor to make any repairs or modifications to your property if they claimed to have a degree or diploma claiming their excellence at what they do?

This kind of fraudulent representation has already happened, and led to some horrifying consequences. In 2003 one Laurence Perry was convicted of manslaughter. He took an 8 year old girl off her insulin and she died. Later, it was discovered that he represented himself with fake medical degrees. That’s an old story, so in all likelihood he’s out of jail by now.

A similar story unfolded as recently as a week ago, when “Doctor” John Curran was convicted of wire fraud and money laundering, after he “treated” 18 year old Taylor Alves in 2002 for terminal ovarian cancer. He basically ruined her life, which was already in jeopardy after such a crushing diagnosis. He’s behind bars for 12 years.

Certainly it’s not only medical degrees or MBA’s which are on offer from these operations.

The sponsors behind these illegal documents treat it as though it’s any other product. One member of bulkerforum.biz (among numerous others) who goes by the name of “Princess” is clearly very experienced in this field. She posted the following back in October of 2007, and apparently generated quite a bit of interest:

Topic: Mailers needed

Hi all.
for those who do not already know
I Sponsor a University program.
I am looking for more mailers to join our mailing group because my program is expanding.
A leads related program.
Pay starts at $18 to $20 depending on volume, for a good lead.

I use a non URL add that works through an email voice mail system, there is a phone number in our adds.
Only USA or Canada leads needed.
A qualified Mailer should be able to generate at least 10-20 good leads per day.
12 leads *$20 = 240$ USD a day
The conversion our good mailers have, is 70% good leads and about 30% bad. They make from $500 to $1500 weekly.
Payments, sent weekly via Bank Wire or WU.

Thanks Dianna

Cute. “Princess” Dianna wants to sell us fake degrees.

She continued to push this promotion several more times right through November 2007.

Note the specificity of what constitutes a “good lead”. No websites, period. This is probably due to the arrest, prosecution and conviction of sponsors such as Craig and Alton Poe, back in December 2004. You can read a brief description of their conviction here. The story itself is quite entertaining not only because it involves lowlife criminal spammers going to jail, but also because of how it came to the attention of the Pennsylvania Deputy Attorney General:

Colby Nolan  is probably the first animal to hold this distinction — an executive MBA from a university.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Jerry Pappert isn’t amused, since Colby is a pet cat and a Texas-based online college allegedly gave the feline a degree for $399.
…
Pappert’s office used the pet cat to investigate an alleged scheme designed to promote and sell bogus online academic degrees.

The main reason it was so easy to prosecute them and send them to jail is because they gathered their so-called “diploma leads” via easy to identify websites. Diploma sponsors couldn’t ignore this and so they adopted a variety of alternate methods of generating the leads, most notably via throwaway voicemail phone numbers.

None of this makes the practice any more legal, or any more legitimate. If you attempt to use a fake document to gain employment, that’s a crime. in the United States: It’s a federal offence. Several states have begun cracking down on these illicit operations, and more than half of the states in the US have specific laws on the books regarding the sale of these documents, or the use of them as personal documentation.

As with most other types of spam-related crime, this is generally considered a variety of fraud.

In the case of the Poe brothers, they also generated fake grades transcripts, which is a further federal offence.

As with most other products promoted via illegal spammers: you should avoid these at all costs. Princess said it herself: “It’s so simple just too good to be true.”

There is a fantastic blog which tracks illegal diploma mills called (appropriately) diplomamillnews.blogspot.com. Definitely worth a read.

One can only hope that spammers convicted of this type of fraud end up being represented by lawyers with similar “credentials.”

Source: http://ikillspammers.blogspot.com/2007/12/fake-diplomas-are-illegal.html

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 Last March, an airline employee in Orlando, Fla., was caught sneaking guns and marijuana onto a plane. The arrest of the man, who was sentenced last month to 15 years in prison, highlights the need for more stringent background checks of licensed airport workers.

While air passengers have become accustomed to going through the security checkpoints put into place after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the logistics of operating an airport make similar requirements for all employees virtually impossible. That is why it is so important that workers go through thorough background screening before being hired to work at airports.

We hope those checks become stricter next month when the Transportation Security Administration takes over the job of investigating the backgrounds of approximately 1.2 million licensed aviation workers. The checks had been handled by the Federal Aviation Administration since 9/11.

The switch comes as the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to crack down on the possibility of an attack being perpetrated by workers who are not required to go through security checkpoints to get on an airplane or enter a sensitive area.

Under the TSA, every licensed aviation worker will be checked against the federal government’s complete terror watch list, which is operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FAA only has utilized a partial list in its screening of 21 types of FAA licensees, including flight instructors, air-traffic controllers, dispatchers and flight engineers.

The TSA already conducts background checks on many non-licensed airport employees, such as baggage handlers and store clerks. We think having licensed employees go through the same process will help make security more consistent and tighter.

With the new system, licensed aviation workers will be rechecked every time the Terrorist Screening Center’s database is updated, helping ensure that employees’ information is matched against the latest available data. The FAA currently only checks people when they apply for an aviation worker licenses. Limited resources prevent the agency from conducting ongoing updates.

We agree with TSA officials that the new process will raise the baseline of security at the nation’s airports and help passengers feel a little safer when they head off into the sky.

Source: http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071205/OPINION01/712050301

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A resume is a modest document - a dry, page-long summary of achievements that, while failing to capture what writer Richard Price calls “the wonder of me,” makes a serviceable introduction between job seeker and job giver.

And according to many experts, it’s more often than not a steaming pile of bovine feces filled with fraudulent academic credentials, mysterious omissions and wildly embellished job descriptions.

“When some people start dreaming up resumes, they go into an almost novelistic mode,” says Michael Hershman, president of the risk-management firm the Fairfax Group, who cites studies that say fully 70 percent of resumes include a “major misstatement of fact.”

“I think there’s a lot of fraud, personally,” agrees Dorothea Gaulden, a former executive and author of the business ethics tome “Right Makes Might.” “Fraud is everywhere.”

Paul Viollis, the CEO of Risk Control Strategies, a Manhattan security screener for high-end clients, estimates conservatively that six of 10 resumes include “exaggerated or blatantly fraudulent” information. Other experts put the number between 10 and 20 percent.

Some claim resume fraud is on the rise - while others disagree, all concur that people are getting nabbed more often, due to a steep rise in background checks.

And even if claiming a Harvard degree when you actually flunked out of CUNY gets you in the door, misrepresentations can come back to haunt their perpetrators. That’s been demonstrated by a number of recent incidents, which experts say have caused employers to look at resumes more closely.

Former MIT Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones resigned in April after an anonymous source tipped off her egghead associates that she’d fabricated academic degrees when applying for her first job at the university in 1979.

Last year, Radio Shack CEO David Edmondson switched off his career at the electronic retail giant after press reports that he’d fudged information about academic degrees he didn’t receive. Ditto football coach George O’Leary , who was hired and then fired by Notre Dame, for citing phony academic credentials.

The most common misrepresentations are academic degrees, previous salaries and haziness about gaps in employment, says Jason Morris, COO of employeescreenIQ, though he adds that some misrepresentations are honest mistakes or miscommunications.

By: Brian Moore

Source: http://www.employeescreen.com/blog/2007/12/hires-and-liars-employeescreeniq-quoted.html

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The odds of needing a drug test to either get a job or keep it have increased in recent years.

Terry Narum, president of SecurScreen in Minot, estimated that 60 percent of new hires take pre-employment drug tests today.

“The bigger businesses are pretty much all doing it,” Narum said.

SecurScreen, which has operated in Minot for several years, is among local companies that offer drug and alcohol testing among their services. Testing can include pre-employment, random, return to duty, follow-up and post-accident.

Trinity Health’s occupational health program has offered drug testing for a number of years and has seen the demand for services remain strong.

On Oct. 1, Brenda Borders opened Northern Testing in Minot. She previously worked in the drug and alcohol testing field in Minot and has been involved in workforce safety for about 15 years.

Preble Medical Services, based in Mandan, opened its first office 20 years ago and now has additional offices in Minot and Fargo. It is considering adding two more offices in the state.

“It’s a growing business,” said owner Mary Ann Preble, Mandan. “We are getting more and more companies that just want to make sure that their new hires especially, when they put them on, that they are drug-free.”

More employers also are motivated by discounts offered on their workers’ compensation premiums if they test, Preble said. Post-accident testing is popular because if workers’ compensation finds drugs or alcohol contributed to the accident, the employer’s liability is lessened.

Preble said the interest in drug testing is statewide, regardless of location or size of community.

“It’s not just the big companies or the big cities,” said Narum, whose travels have been to places as small as Columbus or Willow City.

Testing companies now commonly offer on-site screening to employers, even in rural communities.

Borders said as larger numbers of employers screen out applicants through drug testing, more of those rejected job seekers will end up at the doors of employers who don’t screen. That increases the pressure on those employers to implement testing.

“Companies don’t really want to have to spend the money, but they are becoming forced to,” she said.

However, she said testing protocols can be affordable. For instance, a company with 100 employees may be able to fund a testing program for less than $700 a year, she said.

The savings to companies comes in the assurance of a reliable work force with less turnover, Borders said.

“In the long run, it does help you find a better quality employee,” she said.

Darrell Roos, president of Northern Tier Federal Credit Union, said the credit union looked at the labor market generally and decided to implement drug testing about two years ago to head off potential problems.

“It’s so costly to train individuals and get them going that any tools we can use beforehand that will give us a little better chance of having a successful hire are well worth it,” he said.

The pre-employment testing and random testing of all employees also offers a sense of security to employees and credit union members.

“In our case – having people dealing with other people’s money– our members have a right to know that the people here are trustworthy and that they are drug-free. A drug-free work place is important to us,” Roos said.

Jerry Frye, safety director at SunPrairie Grain, said the government requires drug and alcohol testing for its drivers, which adds some expense, but can be taken care of conveniently with on-site testing.

SunPrairie has elected to purchase pre-employment testing as well.

“Now days it just seems like it’s the going thing,” Frye said. “You have to protect yourself from every angle.”

Federal and state governments have laws that set protocol for testing in safety-sensitive positions. Testing in the transportation industry goes back to 1989. Bus drivers, railroad engineers, airline pilots and pipeline workers now are among occupations where testing is required.

In addition to occupations where safety is paramount, jobs that require a level of public trust are increasingly looking to drug testing. Borders said some telemarketing firms are enforcing drug-free work places at the insistence of clients, who want assurances about employees who handle financial information.

Because some employers have their own protocols for testing, procedures related to testing can vary.

In general, the test most commonly used checks for PCP (phencyclidine), amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine and opiates.

If results of tests are positive, a sample goes to a laboratory that further defines the results and involves a physician in determining whether legal or illegal use of a drug is occurring.

Even when a laboratory is involved, employers get results back quickly, often the next day.

Small employers are able to join with other employers to create a pool of workers for random tests. Narum said SecurScreen typically tests 20 percent of a pool annually. However, because pools are random, some employees may be tested more than once.

Local companies offering the screening also assist employers to develop and administer drug and alcohol testing policies. They provide training to supervisors and educational sessions to employees so they know their rights and what the testing entails.

Local testing companies also sell instant test kits to parents for use at home, or will conduct confidential tests in their offices at the requests of parents

By: JILL SCHRAMM

Source:http://www.minotdailynews.com/News/articles.asp?articleID=16566

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