Better Background Checks Improve Entire Community
CSU appears to be taking a measured - and appropriate - approach to developing broader policies to conduct background checks on all prospective employees.
Colorado State University already had began pursuing changes in how it conducts background checks when an employee in the human resources office, Samuel Kase White, was arrested last fall. White is facing charges of sexually assaulting six women. Police found evidence he had used CSU’s computers to look up addresses of female employees, but there is not evidence that he visited homes of any of those employees.
University officials have been working to get the broader background check policy in place for more than a year. While it would have been more favorable to have this policy in place earlier than the expected Oct. 1 launch, it is also understandable that CSU wants to get it right on this important approach.
A number of factors have to be considered for the 8,000-plus employees and more than 4,700 student workers, including level of security, hiring an additional employee to conduct the checks and negotiating layers of bureaucracy. A CSU spokesman said the university already expects to conduct 4,000 checks this year at a cost of $240,000.
Meantime, the spokesman said he wasn’t sure of the status of another proposal to check backgrounds of current employees. We urge the university to make these checks a priority once the broader policy is implemented.
Source: http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080923/OPINION01/809230309/1014/OPINION