What an automated background check misses

Twenty dollars and four minutes buys a background check from any of a dozen sites. For a lot of decisions that is genuinely the right purchase, and we say so to people who ask us.

What follows is what those four minutes cover, what they cannot cover, and the point at which the cheap answer stops being an answer.

The difference is not whether tools are involved. It is whether somebody reads the output and then goes looking for what is not in it.

What is a background check?

A background check is a search of databases and records assembled by someone else. Court records, public records, sanctions lists, address histories and other sources may be searched depending on the provider and the purpose of the check.

Background screening versus background check is a distinction the industry makes and clients rarely do. An employer background check is the regulated version: consent on file, a defined scope, and rules about what happens if the result costs somebody the job. Background screening services sell that. The consumer sites sell the other thing, and both get called a background check.

A database can tell you what it contains. It cannot tell you what was never in the database.

What shows up on a background check?

Whatever those databases hold about that name, and the second half of that sentence is where the trouble starts.

Court records in the United States are held county by county, and coverage differs by county. A conviction filed under a middle name, a maiden name or a transliteration that a clerk typed differently will not match.

The same limitation applies when screening an executive, director, founder or company: the result depends on which sources were searched and how deeply they were reviewed.

How far back does a background check go?

Seven years for most of it, and that is not a policy choice by the vendor. The Fair Credit Reporting Act, at 15 U.S.C. 1681c, bars a consumer reporting agency from including civil suits, civil judgments and arrest records that are more than seven years old. Paid tax liens and collection accounts, the same. Bankruptcies get ten.

Are background checks accurate?

A background check can be accurate about what it finds while still missing important information. The real issue is coverage: how much of the relevant record ever reached the sources that were searched.

Three failure modes account for most of what we are called in to sort out.

• The wrong person Common names produce mixed files, and the more common the name, the likelier the match is somebody else.
• The missing county A clean report can mean the record is not there, or that nobody looked in the place where it is.
• The company nobody checked The subject is clean. The three entities they are a director of are not. A company background check is a separate search, and no person-level lookup performs it for you.

How much does a background check cost?

Twenty to eighty dollars at the consumer sites. Background check firms selling regulated employment screening charge more, because consent handling and adverse action notices are part of the product. A comprehensive background check run by a person costs a multiple again, and takes days.

The more important the decision, the less useful a one-size-fits-all database search becomes.

When you need a person instead

Both sides use tools, but a deeper background investigation goes beyond the database. The difference is what happens after the initial results arrive.

A deep background check follows the things a database has no field for. Corporate filings in each country the subject has operated in. Litigation under previous names. Who else appears at the same registered addresses. Press and archived pages in the original language. Sanctions and enforcement lists, worked through properly, since a fuzzy name match on those produces noise in both directions.

For higher-risk decisions, this is where investigative due diligence begins: going beyond database screening to examine the people, companies, relationships, reputation and risks that may not appear in a standard report.

Executive background checks are where this distinction becomes especially important, because senior people leave more traces and better managed ones. Anybody can spot the gap in a curriculum vitae. The finding is what was happening during it.

Where we come in

UnderWave handles the investigative layer: deeper background research on people and companies when a standard database check is not enough. We connect public records, corporate information, online activity, adverse information and cross-border sources to identify what a routine screening may miss.

If a database lookup answers your question, buy the database lookup. We would rather tell you that in a ten minute call than write you a report you did not need.

The right level of screening depends on what you are trying to decide. A routine hire, a senior executive, a new business partner and a high-value transaction do not require the same level of investigation.