My colleague Peter Murphy and I have been talking a lot about background checks lately.  It’s easier than ever to run a basic Internet search on someone, but what information do you find? And are there any limts?

Today, Peter talks about two recent settlements of background check claims against employers. Both cost the employers big dollars. Here’s what you can learn from them.

Peter Murphy

 

Back in March, Dan noted that plaintiffs’ lawyers were brining an increasing number of lawsuits under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”).

This seems to be occurring for two reasons. First, the FCRA contains very specific steps an employer must follow when obtaining and then using a background check for employment related purposes, including the following:

  1. Make a clear and conspicuous written disclosure to the job applicant that a consumer report may be obtained for employment purposes;
  2. Have the applicant authorize in writing the procurement of the report;
  3. And, before taking any adverse action based in whole or in part on the report, provide the applicant with:
    1. a copy of the report; and
    2. a description in writing of the employee’s rights under the FCRA.

If one of these steps is being systematically violated by an employer, then there is the potential for a lawsuit involving multiple plaintiffs or even a class of plaintiffs across the employer’s operations.

The second reason for the increasing number of FCRA lawsuits is that they expose employers to damages for each FCRA violation, as well as punitive damages, costs, and significant attorney’s fees.

Thus, unless employers review their hiring practices and ensure FCRA complaint, they could be exposed to costly lawsuits, as Dan and others warned back then.

Their warnings were prescient, as demonstrated by two recent settlements in FCRA cases.

In the first case, the employer accepted online job applications–just like almost all employers. The applicants alleged that the employer’s online application system did not comply with the FCRA’s procedural provisions addressing authorizations for a background check, or provide FCRA mandated disclosures to the applicants.

These procedural violations could have been enough to expose the employer to liability under the FCRA.

According to the applicants, however, the employer also was taking adverse employment actions based on information in the background checks without providing them a copy of the report or the required opportunity to correct or explain any discrepancies.

Although the employer denied any wrongdoing, it ultimately agreed to a $5.053 million settlement that recently was approved by a district court judge.

The only ones getting rich as a result of this settlement, though, were the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who received about $1.52 million in attorneys’ fees in comparison to the $50 payment to each of the eligible class members.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys were just as pleased with a district court’s preliminary approval of an FCRA settlement in a case pending in Virginia. Just like the prior case, the claims in this case stemmed from allegations that the employer violated the procedural protections of the FCRA, and then also failed to give job applications the ability to respond to adverse information in the background check.

Under the judge’s recent order, the plaintiffs’ attorneys would get 25 % of the $4,000,000 proposed settlement, and each potential class member would receive statutory damages of $53.

The numerous procedural and substantive provisions of the FCRA can be difficult to decipher, and as the above examples demonstrate small compliance mistakes can lead to costly and time consuming lawsuits.

Although we may sound like a broken record, employers should therefore consult with trusted counsel when necessary to ensure that their job application process can survive a FCRA challenge, and that their authorization forms and disclosure notices comply with FCRA’s requirements.

It’s not as easy as it first appears.