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- In its first background check, one Hotel found the applicant falsified his application
and was convicted for possession of drugs.
- Another firm had no idea eight felons were among its employees; and two were on trial.
- In purchasing a company, the labor attorney recommended a background search on all
employees before the deal was closed. The search revealed 8% of the workforce were using
falsified social security numbers.
- A guard service was found guilty for inadequately checking a guard's references when the
guard helped steal from their client. The charge - negligent hiring as they failed to
investigate and the employee had a criminal record. The damages paid were over $300,000.
- An employee who had previously been convicted of passing bad checks forged signatures on
sales contracts. The court judged his employer negligent and awarded $175,000.
- A hospital in a very good part of town identified, in its first month of doing
background searches, four felons that they would have hired.
- An Appellate Court awarded $4 million to a woman who was raped by an employee.
His employment application indicated no criminal convictions, when in reality he had.
- A hospital was found negligent in hiring a kidney transplant coordinator who was
unskilled in reading medical charts and a patient was given a transplant of a cancerous
kidney which resulted in his death.
- After driving for a telephone company for only a week, an employee was involved in a
traffic accident. The jury learned that the company never saw the employee's driver's
record which had five traffic tickets within 18 months. They awarded the injured
party $550,000.
Negligent hiring litigation is a growing problem!
Damages against employers are being awarded where the employer was negligent and failed to
perform a reasonable search into the employee's background prior to hiring. Courts have
ruled that "an employer has a general duty to check criminal records for employees
who will have interface with the public, or who could have a foreseeable opportunity to
commit a violent crime against someone in the course of their employment".
Today's litigious society has created an
environment which requires management to be armed with numerous tools. Many employers
currently spend little time verifying the accuracy of employment applications; and,
although they would like to adequately screen applicants, the cost to do so has, in the
past, been financially prohibitive.
"Employers can minimize their exposure to claims by
conducting thorough reference checks and background investigations of job
applicants."
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