London Calling But Not Doing Background Checks On Its Foreign Workers

Foreign care workers escape background check

Tens of thousands of immigrants are working with vulnerable elderly people and children without undergoing full criminal record checks, it has emerged.

Senior police officers have warned the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith of the scale of the problem in a report examining the affect on the UK of immigration from Eastern Europe.

For the entire article go to the telegraph.com

Here is yet one more nutty lapse in a world of nutty lapses.   The western world makes so much of terror threats and then in places like the UK they do little to run background checks on its foreign workers.   Clearly, most British natives avoid any work dealing with the elderly, infirmed or in the different service industries.  It’s tough work and often thankless.  But someone has to do it.  Enter the foreign workers.

So, alright, maybe that new foreign worker helping Mom or Dad or whomever is not really a terrorist.  Instead maybe they are a thief or have a record of being physically abusive.  It would make sense to run a background check to find out, before they go pilfering your loved one’s money, jewelry or valuable possessions.

Since with the UK part of the hiring is through government service, it would stand to reason that they would be sure to run preemployment background checks.   I suppose that would be too thorough.

As for here, across the pond, in the United States, if you are a health care service facility of any sort, or if you are the children of someone who needs an attendant, it would be wise to order criminal background searches.  Corra has one client who insists all assisted living employees are vetted before…well…assisting their residents.   Makes sense.  Smart idea.

Check them out before you hire.

Hard Times for Some Make for Good Times for Other Businesses

Starting Up in a Down Economy

Nobody loves a recession*. But many successful entrepreneurs say that, in retrospect, they were lucky to have launched their businesses in tough times.

From: Inc. Magazine | By: Ryan McCarthy, Nadine Heintz, Bo Burlingham

Case Study No. 1: How Method Weathered the Dot-com Bust

* A recession is commonly defined as two consecutive quarters during which the country’s gross domestic product shrinks. It is too soon to say whether the economy is in a recession now.

When they look back on the early days of their start-up, Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan remember that a lot of potential investors laughed at them. The Bay Area, where they were living, was awash in Internet start-ups.

For the entire article go to Inc.com

Yesterday the stock market was in the toilet. It has been bad lately, but yesterday it took another major dip. If we are not in a recession, we are still in something pretty lousy. There is a definite economic downturn and with the two presidential candidates espousing mainly the usual sound bites, it leaves the rest of us wringing out hands.

But then in the down economy there will be businesses who flourish. In the past depressions and recessions there are businesses that found their way to either win their way to the needs and fantasies of the greater masses or have focused their goods and services to meet the luxury desires of the more affluent. So whether you go wide or narrow with your goods and services there are ways to make some money.

And when you are making money, chances are you are hiring new employees. You should be running background checks on your new job candidates so that as you lift your business off the ground it doesn’t suddenly plummet, thanks to incompetent workers. Incompetent, duplicitous and thieving employees can do more to end your winning streak than just about anything else.

Corra will offer preemployment screening packages and other background checks to meet your growing business’ future needs.

Check them out before you hire. Call Corra.

Go Green and Recruit the Best Job Candidates

Workers: Employers Not Green Enough

A majority of U.S. employees feel businesses could be doing more for the environment.

From: Inc.com |By: Alexandra Zendrian

Despite gains in workplace green practices, many workers feel their employers still aren’t doing enough to protect the environment.

Nearly 60 percent of 2,281 workers surveyed by Adecco USA, a Melville, N.Y.-based human resources firm, said they felt their employers should be taking more steps to reduce or recycle waste. Among all respondents, women and younger employees were the biggest supporters of workplace green practices.

For the entire article go to Inc.com

Employees want to work in an ecologically sound business environment. More so, they know that clients will be more responsive to businesses that are going green. So it would stand to reason that your employment candidates with the best potential would gravitate to the more environmentally sound businesses.

So when you are recruiting candidates and preparing to interview them, run background checks and so forth, realize that you will attract the better job candidates by making your business a safe working environment. It may help you reduce your insurance costs, and it will create, overall, a better ambiance.

It pays to hire employees who aspire to green practices. In fact, it may pay to hire a specialist who can turn your business green. You would want to run the education verification as well as the criminal background check and other background searches as part of your preemployment screening package. Put someone on the job who knows what needs to be done to make your office environmentally compliant.

It’s important. It’s healthy. And it’s good for business.

Check them out before you hire. Call Corra for background checking services.

Looking for a Job? Watch What You Write on Your MySpace Pages

More Recruiters Logging On

A survey finds employers are turning to social networking sites in the hunt for talent.

From: Inc.com : Laura Palotie

A growing number of employers are planning to make better use of social networking sites as a recruiting tool, a recent study shows.

More than a third of 150 recruiters surveyed nationwide said they would tap into sites like Facebook and Myspace to scan profiles of job applicants, according to Robert Half International, a Menlo Park-Calif.-based staffing firm. Another 62 percent said they would turn to more professional networking sites like LinkedIn. By contrast, video resumes and Second Life were considered less important for finding new talent.

For the entire article go to INC.com

If you get too frisky on your MySpace or Face Book or some other social networking site, it might cost you. Human Resource people monitor these sites, checking out the behavior of employment candidates. Depending on what they see and who they are, and how open minded they are, you could end up missing out on a job.

In fact, Corra, being a company that performs background checks, has been solicited at times by different companies to monitor the social networks for them. We would be kind of like the Santa of the job world, checking in to see who has been naughty, who has been nice. It is a little much for Corra, so we have politely refused. Whether background checking services have is another issue.

Personally, I love MySpace, Face Book and the other social networks. While some pages can be tedious, others are fresh and innovative and lot of fun to peruse. Being a bit older than the initial demographic, it’s still a bit of a learning curve, negotiating the social networks. But it can be fun.

But if I was up for a job, I may be careful. At the same time, if I were a Human Resources Manager, I can see the logic of looking up your job prospects. Let’s face it, you don’t want someone who behaves like an idiot. But then sometimes the more eccentric souls and the more competent. We all know a few.

Check them out before you hire. Call Corra.

Background Checks Uncover Phony Documents From Undocumented Workers

FBI arrests illegal immigrants in NM driver’s license case

The Associated Press

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A criminal complaint was filed against a Brazilian man and a Kazakhstan woman after federal agents arrested 10 illegal immigrants in an investigation into an alleged smuggling operation involving fake documents to obtain New Mexico driver’s licenses.

For the entire article go to philly.com

I don’t know about now, but for a long time it was relatively easy to obtain a driver’s license in New Mexico. In the years I lived there, it was a matter of going in to the DMV, filling out the forms, taking the tests and trying not to look too weird when the finally snapped your photo for the driver’s license. After passing, you would wait about fifteen minutes, and the clerk would hand you your brand new license. Very cool. I am speculating here, but perhaps that’s why the suspected parties chose that state, believing it was easy pickings for scams. What a rude awakening, I am happy to see.

Now, New Mexico also used to be the number one state for single car fatalities. That’s when you don’t need to crash into another car to die as a result of a traffic accident. You roll over or strike an abutment, something. With the state being the fourth largest, geographically speaking, in the country, and with it being one of the least populated, it took some doing to kill yourself in a car wreck. Maybe the drive through liquor stores had a little something to do with it. Good guess, eh?

But I do love the state, and I really don’t like to read that anyone is abusing its good graces by trying to pass bad paper. I mean, here in Los Angeles, we see enough phony identity to saturate the nation. Walk on the periphery of MacArthur Park, yeah, where someone left the cake out in the rain, as the old song goes, and you can find anything from phony Driver’s Licenses and Social Securities Numbers, to phone birth certificates.

So if you are an employer, as they did so wisely in New Mexico, don’t trust what you read. Verify. Run the Social Security Trace and the DMV Motor Vehicle Driving Report, along with criminal background checks and the education verification. Be careful and be sentient. Do your best not to allow anyone nefarious bunch to sneak something past you.

Check them out before you hire.

Background Checks Can Help Prevent Thieving Employees

Manhattan Beach News

Accountant steals $200,000 from her own place of worship

By Julie Sharp

Over about three years, Traci Anderson embezzled around $200,000 from a Manhattan Beach church that was her place of worship and employer.

Anderson, 37, of Manhattan Beach, pleaded no contest in Torrance Superior Court June 9 to one embezzlement charge and a grand theft charge was dropped in exchange for her plea, according to the Daily Breeze. She was sentenced to two years in prison according to Deputy District Attorney Paul Guthrie for stealing from her employer, Church of the Beach Cities, and could have faced a maximum sentence of five years for the grand theft charge.

For the entire article The Beach Reporter

This is an old story but certainly new to you when it’s your worker you discover has just stolen your money.  Embezzlement is a big problem, which is one of the reasons you should always be running credit reports as part of your preemployment  background checks.  Quite often the employment candidate in financial trouble will cause you financial trouble.   As for the rest, they’ll get in trouble later, and that’s when the stealing starts.

These are some hard times out there, what with the economic downtown.   At Corra we are seeing a lot of financial frauds, scams and some “indiscretions,” to put it nicely, in the work place.  The article above is one instance where the employee thought the company money was her money.  She was confused and thought they were partners and not on an employer-employee relationship.

There are a lot of a reasons employees will steal from you.   And a lot of things they can steal.  Money is only one of them.  Competitors may pay well for your proprietary information or for your valuable databases.  As for the employee, they can have substance abuse and gambling troubles or just consumer habits that have given the term shop to you drop a whole new meaning.   The home equity situation could have left them hanging.  As I said there are reasons.  Reasons breed trouble.  You don’t need trouble.

So if you aren’t running background checks and have in place a thorough preemployment screening program, then you got to be crazy.  Times call for it.  Get smart.

Check them out before you hire.  Call Corra.

Air Force Tanker Controversy Affects Employment

Protest of Air Force tanker contract award to Northrop upheld

By Peter Pae and Aamer Madhani
Special to The Times

June 19, 2008

Aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp. said Wednesday that it was suspending the hiring of thousands of engineers in Southern California after a ruling by a federal auditing agency left its $35-billion Air Force contract to build aerial refueling tankers in limbo.

The Government Accountability Office ruled that the contract awarded to Century City-based Northrop was flawed and recommended that the Pentagon hold another competition for what is expected to be the biggest military purchase for at least a decade.

The ruling was a major victory for rival Boeing Co., which had challenged the contract award, arguing that the Air Force had unfairly favored Northrop’s bid to build 179 tankers.

For the entire article go to LA Times.

I have been following this story with great interest. For one thing there is an issue about the efficiency of the Air Force, what with their former head getting fired. Apparently, under his watch, the Air Force misplaced a bunch of nukes and sent them on the wrong plane to the wrong destination. Then there is the controversy about the more conventional fighter planes versus the new UAV’s, or the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The thought is that they are more necessary to fight future wars than adding too many fighters.

Not that all this means very much with respect to this new controversy and accommodating rivalry between Northrup and Boeing. Except there is reasonable believe that the Air Force study was flawed in its means of appraising the quality measures of the two competing Air Force refueling tankers that are designed to carry this country into somewhere near the middle of the century.

So what does this mean? It means jobs. Since we in California were the capital for aerospace and defense related industries, a decision to reward Boeing with the contract instead of Northrup can make a significant difference in employment around here.

As a background checking company, Corra services the entire nation and part of the world, so on that grounds whomever wins the contract is of little significance to us. But we are headquartered in Los Angeles and we are the homeboys, so any contracts that favor Southern California will always have our favorable view.

Of course there is the possibility that if the contract is awarded to a local company, there are sub-contractors we know who may well bring us their revitalized preemployment screening and background checks. That can never hurt.

Meanwhile, we can use a new refueling tanker. We can use one that isn’t flawed or doesn’t experienced serious cost overruns. We can use one that actually meets its design specs, one that actually works well. Our nation depends on this. So whichever company gets picked, make us all proud with a state of the art refueling tanker. Not just your workers, but the nation is counting on you.

Check them out before you hire.

Cracking Down on Undocumented Workers

270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push
By JULIA PRESTON

WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.”

For the entire article go to the New York Times.

There are crackdowns on undocumented workers occurring all over the country. Call them illegal workers or undocumented workers, it doesn’t matter when your bottom line is concerned. What you do need to know is what was once considered cheap labor may suddenly become very expensive if you are fined by the government or your business is shut down.

More than a few states are eyeballing the Arizona laws, which put the onus on hiring undocumented workers on the employers. Forget about building walls on the borders. In Arizona they are going to the source–the employer. If you hire undocumented workers in Arizona, you are subject to fines, closure and having your property seized. No fun.

Others can argue the merits or the menace of undocumented workers in the United States. For the Corra Group, we are concerned with making sure the clients are aware their job candidates are who they really say they are. That’s why we encourage among the background checks that our clients run the Social Security Trace. This will validate the social security number and for the most part verify it belongs to the candidate. It also shows the past residences of that candidate.

Soon Corra will have online, paperless I-9 Searches. They will be cost effective and very convenient. And while you are checking out your candidate’s identity, you should be running criminal background checks as well. The last thing you need for your business is to be caught with undocumented workers with criminal records. Then you run the risk of being the poster child for the new government crackdowns.

Check them out before you hire. Call Corra.