12/19/2012
When you are promised flat pricing without any pass-through fees for traditional county criminal record searches in any given state, what counties would you expect to fall into that?
A screener that does this may have a very different definition of county than backgroundchecks.com does. For instance, a group of counties in New York can only be searched through the Office of Courts Administration. At backgroundchecks.com, we consider this a county search as each item is performed at the county level. Other screening companies may consider this a statewide search, thereby removing it from the package that includes a flat fee for counties, and requiring that this $65 pass-through fee be paid. Either way, you end up paying the fee if you do an OCA search, the question is whether your vendor was up-front in telling you about it.
The real key in all of this is to make sure that you know exactly what you are getting so that you can confidently rely on it. While you want to use accurate background checks regardless of your industry, this is highly important for more heavily-regulated industries where regulators make take action even when there is no risk of harm to anyone. If a company uses old data when newer is available, or performs a statewide search when you really need a county, highly-regulated industries can run into a wide variety of issues that could threaten the life of your business.
