Background Check: Skip Trace Secrets Series

There are over 1.9 million people in United States prisons for drug and alcohol-related crimes. People with criminal convictions have rights. However, business owners and landlords have the right to investigate and owe a duty to the neighboring residents to not have a convicted felon living in their community. Business owners have liability and insurance requirements to satisfy and because of this duty, we do background checks.

What happens to your company if you hire someone without a background check and over $25,000.00 disappears collectively from your client’s holding accounts? It happened to I.T. Management Services. Before the owners revealed to employees that missing money was known to them, every employee in the company was investigated.

Any person who had access to any accounting, receivables and disbursements received a background check I was assigned a background check for an employee of the company whom we’ll call Sally.

Sally was a perfect, punctual employee who managed condominium properties for I.T. Management Services. Her job was to collect monthly maintenance fees from the condominium owners and pay vendors such as lawn care, garbage services and the pool cleaner.

As I processed every detail in the background search, I saw that she bought a brand new 2003 Mercedes Benz just six months prior to the discovery of the missing money. Sally also had a theft conviction in 1999 in another county, a county she had not lived in since her conviction. The timing of the new car purchase was in perfect alignment with the company’s accounting discrepancy. This wasn’t a detail that was shared with me until long after her conviction.

When I brought the findings of my background check to the owner, he seemed shocked. Sally drove an old beater Ford Taurus to work every day. From there, the CPA audited every account that Sally had access to and discovered that large checks were being written to a landscaping company which was registered to her brother, and her name was also on the account.

Checks for unauthorized work and most likely for work that had never been done. Sally had been paying fake invoices as a vehicle to embezzle money directly from condominium communities and spending the money freely.

Records showed that Sally put a $10,000 cash down payment on the car of her dreams and when the car was seized it had less than 2,000 miles on it. As it turns out, Sally never made a payment on the car after she bought it, and she was scared to death to be seen driving it.

Sally was nailed. She went to jail, and the car went back to the lien holder. The management company’s error and omissions insurance repaid the stolen money, and restitution was court ordered to be paid by Sally as a condition of probation.

The real moral of the story is you cannot judge a book by its cover. Sally appeared to be a hardworking church lady who always was quick to offer prayer and comfort to those around her in need.

What tipped off the company to the whole scheme Sally put into motion? A repo truck was seen driving the parking lot and talking to the security officer. The repossession agency specifically asked for Sally by name and offered the security officer a nice cash reward to call him if the Mercedes Benz ever up showed up.

The office manager’s main concern for an employee having money troubles would be that temptation and likelihood of taking take a bribe or stealing money.

Background Check 101

Who can do background checks? Most companies that do background checks are not detectives or private investigative firms, but actually deep research firms that specialize in doing background searches after obtaining a signed authorization from an applicant.

Unless the county or state in which you plan on hanging your background search shingle says otherwise, you don’t need to be licensed in any way to perform this business-to-business service.

Alternatively, doing the checks for your personal reasons and your company doesn’t require any special licensing either-only permissible purpose and skill.

If you’re doing your own background check and you uncover information that’s negative and does not come from a reliable source, I do recommend that you hire an outside investigator to confirm your findings. You don’t want to deny someone on the basis of some information you uncovered then come to find out it’s not actually them and you’re getting sued. This is proving you’ve done your due diligence.

The signed release should detail what type of information is being