Are Background Checks Necessary For IT Workers? 402
4foot10 writes "UBS PaineWebber learned a hard lesson after hiring an IT systems admin without conducting a background check. Now its ex-employee is slated to be sentenced for launching a 'logic bomb' in UBS' computer systems that crashed 2,000 of the company's servers and left 17,000 brokers unable to make trades."
Just another advertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, you pay $smallnum, and if $guywithaccess does $badthing, you get paid $bignum to cover your expenses. Let someone guess the odds.
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Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Insightful)
That's your cost for option A.
How much is the bonding service?
That's your cost for option B.
Whether you like it or not, you're paying for insurance either way. The question is which cost is greater, and which provides the greater effective insurance.
Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Insightful)
If one of your system admins, say, sells a database of 2 million social security numbers, how much is that worth?
Ideally, it would a be a mix of the two systems. Some positions do require security and background checks. Bond them, too -- the security check should lower the cost to bond them (and in a high-bond instance, the bonding company would likely do their own background check anyway).
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-matthew
Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not making the argument for background checks; you're making the argument for secure systems that don't allow untrustworthy cowboys to peek at others' mail without supervision.
If someone could prove to me that background checks actually serve any other purpose than to cow potential employees, I'd be willing to consider that there might be some use for them. As things stand, I think they're a silly and - here's the important part - ineffective means of establishing security in business.
Invest some trust in your employees. Verify that the trust is deserved. Punish breaches of trust.
Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
"According to Dawn Cappelli, a senior member at Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team, a 2006 study showed that 30% of insiders who are caught launching an attack against their employers have arrest records, and that those charges don't generally include computer crimes. Some 18% were for violent offenses such as rape and manslaughter, 11% were for alcohol- and drug-related offenses, and another 11% were for theft."
Coupling background checks with secure systems gets the benefits of both.
Re: Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Interesting)
If exactly 0% of good employees have arrest records, then an arrest record would be a pretty good indicator of malicious intent; while it wouldn't allow you to catch the other 70% of baddies, it would give you pretty conclusive evidence against that 30%.
If, on the other hand, the records for good employees were the same (which I suspect is closer to the truth), then an arrest record (or lack of one) would tell you absolutely nothing about an employee's trustworthiness.
And if the records for good employees were generally higher than for bad ones, then an arrest record would be an indicator in FAVOUR of hiring, not against!
So, worrying as those numbers might sound, they're utterly meaningless here without some context and background!
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I always pay my bills on time but I rarely use credit cards and was a college student until recently so I didn;t spend much. Now employers think I am irresponsible with money or I am more likely to steal because thats what people without perfect scores do bla bla bla.
By law they have to tell you they are doing a credit check. But its a common practice and most employers will refuse to hire unless you agree to undergo one. Yes they have t
Re: Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Informative)
Yes I have been denied jobs because my credit score wasn't high enough.
Ha-ha. You are also as likely to be denied a job if it is too good.
Happened to me the one of the few times when I was stupid enough to apply for a bank job. I run a very tight household - no debts besides mortgage (and even that on an accelerated repayment), no credit taken for anything else (my cars are always bought with a money transfer, same for furniture and everything else), no late payments ever, no missed payments ever. And guess what - I failed the credit portion of background check. It looked to non-standard for them and they decided that I probably have some clandestine hidden income to be able to do this (I learned that from an insider much later).
So at least some US banks actually like to see their employees comfortably deep in debt. Just in case so that they do not develop too much independence. Anyway, I have learned the lesson and stick to telecoms now where the background check is mostly limited to references.
Re: Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Insightful)
My employer, a routing software company, just got bought by a chip company.
The forms I currently have to fill out (as a "new employee") require authorizing a credit check. You never know what a kernel developer with bad credit will do, I guess.
Credit checks bother me even more than the more-invasive checks (arrest (not conviction) records, medical history, etc.) because of the downward-spiral potential. When substantially all employers are using them (which of course will happen soon enough), if you get bad credit, you won't be able to get a job.
With bad credit, things cost more, and now your job prospects are limited. Good luck climbing out of the debt.
It's just one of those things that seems to make good sense for every individual employer (like another pet peeve of mine, not training people but expecting them to arrive fully-experienced), but when everyone does it, has significant negative societal impact.
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Of course, I realize this depends on the extremely subjective definitions of "geek" and "nonconformist."
background checks are worthless (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps, but will a background check filter out a person who doesn't have a record? What happens if you piss of your sysadmin (for whatever reason)? You may get a similar situation as UBS. How is a background check going to help you there?
If anything, a psychological profile would be the proper approach. Ask, "Does this person, with a clean record, hold the propensity to go postal (aka, rm -rf *) ?" How many people graduating with a CS or IT de
Re:background checks are worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
And with a failure rate of about 20% (according to my headhunter) these personality tests [calipercorp.com] keep a lot of good people out of jobs.
But I suppose we're all supposed to prostrate in front of the almighty corporation. God forbid companies take risks or put in place mitigation strategies so that rogue employees can't bring the whole place down.
Did they make Ken Lay take a personality test? What about Jeff Skilling? I suspect they would have been found ideal based on the types of questions on these tests - which tend to focus on attention to detail, attitude, and trust in coworkers. Yet these men ruined the livelihoods of thousands with their greed. But personality tests don't probe for greed or concern for others (at least not the ones I've taken). They're also pretty invasive, asking about a prospective employee's personal life.
The personality test I took was at a company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My friends back in Silicon Valley couldn't believe some of the questions that were on the test, and would "just have walked out". But I need a job, so I took the test. It said I wasn't gregarious enough and a something of a solitary worker. So despite a director-level assurance that they wanted to hire me, the personality test made the hiring decision for them.
Personality tests are measurements based on what companies think they want to know - and this isn't truly useful information. A "loner" might be able to accomplish more, faster, than folks who are sociable and who hang out at the coffee pot for several minutes a day, but according to the Caliper test, these people aren't good fits at most companies.
I think that based on these simple observations, personality tests (and by extension, background checks) are less useful than they're billed as being.
Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Insightful)
OmniMedia's shares dropped 50% when Martha Stewart was arrested. Nothing changed when she was convicted. This is typical market behavior. Even if she were acquitted, the damage was already done.
The arrest is worse than the conviction. Guilty or not, you are still a risk to the company. That's reality.
Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Funny)
So if I run a background check, my email will be read by someone I do know?
-- Should you trust authority without question?
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't fish around like that on the production system. Do it in your test lab with the backups...
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Re:Ask yourself this question (Score:5, Informative)
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Exchange tip: If you find you need to add yourself and permissions are not updating quickly enough, you can do the following:
1) Check to see which server the mailbox resides on and which DC that Exchange server
What for? (Score:2)
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Re:What for? (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't know, either. And since you didn't say how many are, neither do you. But it only takes one to cost a company millions of dollars, or run them right out of business entirely. I have clients that rely utterly on their customers' sense that they handle their data securely and that the team of people who touch that data are trustworthy. One slip could ruin those customers, cost people their jobs, homes... that's a lot more expensive than a background check,
Of course not! (Score:4, Funny)
Our entire civilization will be replaced by a fascist tyranny the moment we allow background checks to happen!
You are free to refuse (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to the free market.
Cheers,
Dave
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No guarantee (Score:5, Insightful)
That means a background check won't catch 70% of the malicious insiders. This article is meaningless without info about the rates of attacks from insiders who would've passed or failed background checks. It's a reasonable hypothesis to say that IT workers with criminal records are more likely to launch insider attacks, but there's no scientific evidence of it in this article. It's all fluff based on one person's case.
Re:No guarantee (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No guarantee (Score:5, Insightful)
Same logic: Per capita, more black people commit crimes than white people, therefore, black people are more dangerous to hire.
Re:No guarantee (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No guarantee (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an obvious fallacy based on what I like to call "The Tyranny of the Random Mean". Like most statistics, the GPs statement is valid, when based on a certain "population". In this case, the entire population of black people, in I presume the USA. And certainly it would be true that, on average, on average, if you selected at random 100 black people from the entire black population in the US, and the same for 100 white people, then the total sum of criminal convictions would probably be higher for the former group. Please note the italised and emboldened words in the above. They are very, very important.
Now, you're conducting a job interview, where the interviewees' skin colours vary. You are concerned about security and you have the above statistic in front of you. The sad fact of life is, most people will read the above and conclude that security-wise, a white person is a safer bet. They weren't. Or that is to say, the above statistic is of no use in telling you whether they are or not. Here's why.
Firstly, statistics is based largely on the fact that when the number of samples from the population is large, say ~100, then general population statistics are applicable. If the sample is, say, one or two, population statistics is of little to no use.
Secondly, and more importantly, your sample is no longer random. N.B. N.B. N.B. !!!!
I'll say that again, in case you missed it.
Your sample is no longer random .
The entire premise of statistics is that you randomly select individuals from the population. Statisticians stay up at night worrying themselves over how to do this, and are even more obsessive about their random number quality that a
You're at a job interview for a specific IT position, yet you want to use a population wide statistic for the entire population in this situation. You're basically assumming that all; qualified, black, geeks, applying for a job at your company, in your town, at this time, is a valid random selection from the entire black population of the United States. Congradulations. You just failed Data Analysis 101.
If you want to actually apply a statistic validly, again, you need to have a random sample, from the right population. In a job interview, you're never going to have a random sample. It may or may not be quasi random, but even it if was, you'd need a statistic for all contemporary, qualified, black, geeks, probably in your region. If you had that, then you might be justified in applying a statistic, but in reality, with such a small sample size (likely just one guy), the noise would be so high you're just wsting your time.
Instead of trolling for pretty useless statistics and data, companies should just hire based on merit. Take candidates, look them up and down, decide if they personally are the best person for the job. "Normal" is a statistic. Human beings are not homogeneous, they are all different, they all have strengths and weaknesses. If you base your hiring practicies on the averages, then you'll end up with average employees. Mediocre, jacks of all trades who are neither excellent or terrible at anything. And your company too will be as average as they come.
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You must work for big, boring companies. (Score:2)
I too, have been at this for a while. The ONLY place that did a drug screen was for "the phone company". Gah! the clock-punchers there could have used some drugs, IMHO.
Over my career, I've had my fingers on the button for "big money" financial types, military stuff, and other things. Right now I have VPN access to various companies where I could, if I were of a mind to, make some "adjustments" to content that would probably find their wa
Backgroud checks are needed for some IT workers (Score:5, Insightful)
No organization that large should technolgically empower a single person to be able to do that much damage without some sort of review process that would have caught the problem.
Did his changes get reviewed by his peers?
Did they go through some sort of QA process?
While it's a bit scary that they hired a criminal, that's hard to avoid in any large organization.
What's really *really* scary is that their internal processes let him do that much damage. I'd be worried if I were their customer.
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That's not fair. This person has presumably been punished for their crime(s) and paid their debt to society, it's unfair to blacklist him for the rest of his life.
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Don't see the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've certainly heard plenty of stories about disgruntled IT workers in sensitive positions doing things like that—usually a criminal history isn't mentioned. Is there any evidence that there is a correlation between that and long-past criminal convictions that aren't closely related to the kind of damage they later do?
Or is this just a case of "Ooh, something bad happened, lets look for something about the person that might explain it, and then assume that this proves the general utility of background checks"?
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Anything for a buck...
Re:Don't see the point... (Score:5, Informative)
I do background checks for a living.
I wouldn't go as far to say that it's snake oil, but I definitely think it's oversold by so-called security types.
I think they are most useful in predicting some types of violent behavior. In my experience, an individual who gets charged and convicted with domestic violence in their 50s almost always has a dozen speeding tickets, a criminal trespass conviction and maybe a disorderly conduct charge for good measure. Background checks might be useful to predict this type of potential behavior.
On the other hand, people who commit murder or sexual offenses (whether it's in their 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s) won't even have a parking ticket in their name. I feel like they just snap one day. So in this regard, background checks are worthless.
Theft and burglury and related charges are 95% of the time committed by those under 25. It just doesn't come up later in life. Background checks can be misleading in this regard.
Background checks that go back 30 or 40 years are pretty expensive (as noted in the article) and unusual. If you did your crime in the 70s I'm guaranteed not to find it.
My biggest issue is that background checks are hugely dependent on our judicial system, which doesn't operate as "cleanly" as the credit rating system, but for some reason, is treated as if it did.
Money used in defense plays a huge role in things. An extra grand or two on a lawyer might very well be the difference between being offered a plea bargain to misdemeanor 1 Theft, and being offered a plea bargain to misdemeanor 4 unauthorized use of property with the prosecutor agreeing to expunge the case in a year. (Whereas the credit rating system keeps all the records out there, what keeps criminal records around in the judicial system might have very little to do with the crime perpetrated.
How the state legislature enacted laws plays a huge role, though one the security companies like to dismiss. For instance, my state of Ohio has probably the nation's most liberal marijuana possession laws--anything under 100g is a minor misdemeanor, maximum fine $100--and no public record.. In quite a lot of states the same posession is a high level misdemeanor with jail time and obviously, a public record.
Does that mean that two people who've been cited for marijuana possession (same quantity), one in a state like Ohio with no public record, and another in a state with a public record will be treated very differently by companies because of their records? Absolutely. But that neither strikes me as fair or particularly logical--after all, the companies nor the security firms really ever sit down and realize that they are dependent on the state for the information--and that different laws in different states cause different information outcomes. They just use whatever information they have against the job candidate.
Use cost/benefit analysis (Score:2)
I have not been caught yet .. (Score:2, Insightful)
What was the cause? (Score:5, Funny)
In retrospect, it appears that the entire event, as well as the financial damages and the hit to the company's reputation, could've been avoided if UBS PaineWebber, a giant in the financial community, had done a background check on Duronio when he had been hired.
And I see the problem as being caused by a lack of bonuses in IT. Prevent logic bombs, give your IT workers large bonuses!
(I'm talking to you, boss)
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In general... (Score:2)
Ultimately, the guy did it because he didn't get a big enough bonus. His sour grapes = fucked company.
IMO, if you're going to run background checks, it isn't enough to just scan the critical (IT) guys. If you aren't checking everyone who could be a potential threat, then it's
It's a necessary evil (Score:2, Informative)
Been there, done that (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Been there, done that (Score:4, Informative)
Hmm, so I would assume he picked a clean SSN and name, so a background check would have revealed???
There is a place that has 441 employees, and here is the breakdown of their past:
* 29 members have been accused of spousal abuse.
* 7 have been arrested for fraud.
* 19 have been accused of writing bad checks.
* 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses.
* 3 have been arrested for assault.
* 71 have credit reports so bad they can't qualify for a credit card.
* 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges.
* 8 have been arrested for shoplifting.
* 21 are current defendants in lawsuits.
* And in 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving, but released after they claimed Congressional immunity.
Yes, thats congress.
Bringing the Paine (Score:2)
It sounds to me like their HR department was incompetent, the management was incompetent and they gave an employee too much control. I don't think any one employee should have that much control over a company's I
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Background Checks and Credit Checks for IT (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so I know I'm going to get modded down on this, but it's something that is really never spoken about. True, it can affect the job search for many of us, but I support having background checks, on the condition that we the person being investigated be offered a chance to explain ourselves, and to not become prospective employee investigation # 54283.
Re:Background Checks and Credit Checks for IT (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfair? No. You're not the sort of person I want working for me. You don't have a stable family life. As such you're more likely to quit/move and give shorter notice when you do. You have bad credit. You haven't demonstrated (regardless of good or bad reasons) to large financial institutions that you're worth loaning money to. I'm less likely to want to give you access to mine. Finally, you're a criminal. Sure, you were a criminal when you were a kid, but, on paper, you're more likely to be a criminal in the future, and that's nothing my company wants anything to do with.
On the other hand, if you've got a great resume, and you stand out, and it's not a tiebreak, we might overlook SOME of those problems.
I sympathize. I have a divorce. Until recently I had bad credit. I got in trouble as a young adult and have a misdemeanor record (reduced felony). I know if I didn't have the skills I do in my special niche of the IT world, I'd be passed over in favor of others. Thems the breaks. It's the price I pay for the mistakes in my youth.
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The communists won after all (Score:2, Offtopic)
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This is funny (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're underestimating just how huge this crowd is.
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If we do, then I'm going to formally recommend we entitle the fallacy of assuming one snapshot of a vocal fragment of a pseudoanonymous userbase represents the beliefs of every such member, and can be compared to other such snapshots without limit, the "Damn You, User #4466" logical fallacy.
So, back to you, RelliK. You say that Slashdot lambasted Diebold for hiring criminals, then lambas
Re:This is funny (Score:5, Funny)
God, you're so hypocritical sometimes! It's like you're arguing with yourself!
True Story... (Score:4, Insightful)
The WP supervisor had worked for another company and copied a database onto floppies and then erased the production database. He tried to hold the data for ransom, but the company just had him arrested. He did a couple of years in the klink and when he got out he went to work in the billing department of a local utility where he deposited customer payments into his own account. He did a couple years for that as well...He had worked for our company for 2 or 3 months, virtually unsupervised.
The wallet thief turned out to be a mailroom guy who had worked there for years...
Yeah, but... (Score:2)
What was Ken Starr's background? Murder?
The most dangerous ones are the ones who come back empty. Sucks when this happens, and a background check wouldn't have hurt, but you gotta watch your people closely and hope for the best. IT is very dangerous, aggravated assault or not, you can easily get screwed over.
Absolutely (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, bad link! (Score:2)
It's UBS' Fault (Score:2, Interesting)
The question you should be asking is not, "would a background check have prevented this", it's "how the hell could one person alone cause that much damage on UBS' network"?
One person should not have been able to push a logic bomb out to thousands of machines without several other people in the organization knowing about it. Isn't UBS publicly traded? The Sarbanes-Oxley Act should have required that their IT group be audited to ensure that controls were in place to prevent exactly this sort of situation
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How would it have helped? (Score:5, Insightful)
How would burglary and assault (um... 47 YEARS AGO) lead to logic bombs? (From the OP) How would this have helped?
From the article:
Using only publicly available information, Hershman found three incidents, including drug-related charges from 1980 and a tax violation, within 24 hours. Within three or four days, he says investigators found information on a conviction and incarceration from the early 1960s related to aggravated assault and burglary charges. A presentencing[sic] report from the Probation Office in U.S. District Court also lists charges against Duronio from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
So... basically, 27 years ago this guy had a drug case, and more than 40 years ago had an aggravated assault and burglary charge. From this they were supposed to deduce that this guy was going to logic bomb them?
Or, according to TFA and Hershman, this would've been enough for them not to hire him at all or just for computer work? He doesn't say. I've worked in firms that would refuse to hire you if you had anything on your record.
Please note here that Mr. Hershman sells this service and I am not so sure that he would be considered unbiased.
Here is some guy that would have been penalized for something he did 40 years ago?
Talk about 2nd class citizens. Do they understand that over 2% of the population is in prison and a considerable portion of people living today have been in prison or convicted of some offense at one point or another?
One of the engineers I hired had a drug conviction, but it was clear that she was recovering and this was a good opportunity for her. That was several years ago. Do I feel bad about that? Of course not.
I understand why companies feel the need to do criminal background checks to absolve themselves of a possible lawsuit. (They are culpable if they hire an ax-murderer just released from prison and he axifies some people.)
I believe that some of this is designed to find a chink to break down an employee so he/she will accept less in salary.
"Hmm... you have bad credit. Oh look, you also have some speeding tickets. Now, how much did you say you wanted for the privilege of working here?"
Criminal background checks should be used judiciously in sensitive positions. IT is probably one of those... but companies shouldn't just rubber-stamp anyone with a conviction a "no hire".
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Here is some guy that would have been penalized for something he did 40 years ago?
More to the point, this is some guy who hasn't been arrested in 25 years and has apparently been productive for the majority of that time (dunno if he got prison or for how long). This isn't really the sort of thing you have to worry about usually, although sysadmin at a brokerage is perhaps not the best place.
Talk about 2nd class citizens. Do they understand that over 2% of the population is in prison and a considerable
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Why?
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Lampoon (Score:2)
Duronio aka Clark Griswold?
How would a background check stop this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Background checks catch the stupid criminals.
How much is it worth to you? (Score:2)
To wit, I was called into a local electric utility company to do a risk assessment after one of its ex-
Fearmongering for fun and profit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Background checks catch people who lie (Score:2, Interesting)
Catching a liar is much more valuable than disqualifying a murderer or embezzler. The former obviously hasn't learned his lesson yet.
As for protecting your systems from bad acts, keep audit trails.
His bonus... (Score:2, Funny)
Come on now (Score:2, Funny)
Criminals are people (for better or for worse) (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, do the backgrond check (Score:2)
You might end up buying a lot of lunch, but what you want to know is what is this person REALLY like and that takes personal interaction. His "first offense"
When I was a kid... (Score:2, Insightful)
Always check (Score:3, Informative)
She ends up firing quite often over this
I'm actually shocked they DIDN'T do one (Score:3, Interesting)
They actually called my wife back on one of them - at out old house, there was a woman with the same name 1 block away, so our addresses were 1 digit different. That woman had "problems". This has actually turned up 2-3 times, including at our house closing - we had to certify that my wife was NOT the other woman - they took our word, but had to sign a paper
I've held security clearences - they don't prove that you won't do something wrong too - BUT they do tend to get rid of SOME of the chaff - yeah, you lose some wheat too, but...
Problems with background checks (Score:3, Insightful)
These days, companies like ChoicePoint are offering data products mined from a wide array of sources. There are many problems with this approach, starting with the fact you did not consent for people to share your data for this purpose. In the US, the Fair Credit Reporting Act supposedly regulates some information products used for this kind purpose, but there are many ways around. The same kind of information that you have a right, under FCRA, to contest and correct in a credit report can appear in a background check... and lots more.
You have no right to know or contest what is in a background check. Particularly the cheap kind that are sold almost as shrink wrap products.
The information on the background check can be simply wrong. I had a modem line in my house for a short time, less than two years. Possibly because I had it for a short time, the number got recycled fairly quickly after I had it disconnected. Recently I ran a background check on myself, and found data that had nothing to do with me in it. Looking at it carefully, it turned out to apply to the people who got my old modem phone number.
What if those people had been criminals, or terrorists?
Here's another eample. A couple of years ago, a big box store in our area went out of business. A few months before the store went belly up, we had spent $15 there. Later, we got hundreds of dollars of charges on our credit card: somebody at the store ran our credit card number through dozens of times, apparently to bring enough cash to keep it afloat for another month. We told the credit card company to decline the charges. If the information that we had hundreds of dollars of unpaid debt ever appeared on our credit report, we could challenge it. But if it appeared in a background check, we wouldn't even know.
Even where information is correct, it might not be complete. For example, suppose the creditors in the store incident took us to court. That could appear on our background check. But if the judge dismissed the case, it might not appear in the report at all.
Wouldn't a more accurate background check be better? Yes, but it is more expensive. The background company can sell a much cheaper product if they tolerate a lot of mis-information that shows unlucky people in a false light. The employer can tolerate false positives too, unless it is unusally important to hire the best possible person. In those cases they could double check the background check if they aren't scared off; or they could purchase a better background check. Having a selection of price/quality in background checks benefits the employer and the data companies. It's bad for everyone else.
Background checks are a good thing. Inexpensive background checks are a good thing. Cheap (as in shoddy) background checks, which contain information you cannot see, much less contest or correct, are a very, very bad thing. At the very least, the information in the background check should be shown to you first, and you should be able to challenge it before it goes to the employer.
A better system would work like this: somebody ought to offer a "bonded worker" product. You, as the employee, would hire a trusted and respected company to do a background check on you. The bonding company would then produce a risk profile based on the information in that background check, and show it to you. You could query various findings and view and contest the data used to arrive at them. When the report is mutually acceptable, the report would be sent to your prospective employer. If that employer had any special concerns, they would submit them to the bonding company, who would draft a response which you could review and challenge. At any time you
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You don't need background checks for everybody, just for those employees in a position of significant responsibility and authority.
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IT people aren't necessarily any more or less likely to do bad things - but often the consequences of them doing a bad thing are a lot worse (or at least more widespread as in this case).
CEOs and CFOs far more of a risk (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's get real.
Little/no reward (Score:5, Interesting)
Your IS/IT people are less likely to do Bad Things(tm) since there is little or no reward in it for them. Upper levels of managment can embezzel funds, so can lowly finance interns. For them, there is the possibility of stealing millons of dollars over time.
For IS/IT people, what have you really done? It's a larger scale equivalent of breaking a window. You've caused trouble for other people, but there is no benefit to you.
Besides, IS/IT people are easy to keep happy for the most part. Let them have ownership of the network, don't micro-manage them, and buy them the occasional cool gadget. Want a 20" LCD? If the $300 is costs keeps you happy for 6 months, you can have 4. Want the most kick-ass computer in the company? For the $1000 difference it would take, no problem.
IS/IT people are important. They are the ones who know where your data is, how it's organized, and where it's backed up. Their needs are simple too. They mostly do IS/IT work because they like new stuff and gadgets. Throw them a new piece of tech every other month and keep their salaries at least comparable and you won't have to worry.
Disclaimer: I say these things about IS/IT people because I was one, then I managed them, and now I'm happy to just be one again.
Re:Little/no reward (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Are you serious? (Score:4, Funny)
For sysadmins it should be called a wallpaper check.
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