I just got back from the Federal Trade Commission, where I dropped off the result of a few months of work here at CDT. Our petitionOur amended petition is a request to have the FTC look into the practices of a number of companies that ordered criminal background investigations on their employees — terminating many — without following the basic due process rules established in the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

FCRA is an important statute that provides due process rights for people being subjected to background checks. The law gives the targets of checks an opportunity to challenge inaccurate information before that information can be used as a reason to deny a loan, a place to live or a job. Employers performing checks must notify targeted workers that the checks will be performed, provide copies of the reports and explain workers’ rights before terminating them.

We maintain the companies named in our petition, Rail Terminal Services, LLC, H&M International Transportation, Inc, Renzenberger, Inc and Quality Transportation Services, IncQuality Terminal Services LLC, all violated FCRA in ways that infringed on their employees’ core due process rights.

CDT and its fellow petitioners have asked the FTC to examine these companies and these questions, and bring suits against the named companies. We also have asked the FTC to look at instituting notice best practices for individuals that are executing criminal background checks, with the goal of standardizing the information given to subjects of background checks.

CDT also could not have put together this petition without the help from our co-signers: the Legal Action Center, the National Employment Law Project, the National Workrights Institute, Rainbow PUSH and the Teamsters union. We were also helped greatly by Tamara Holder and Ken Merlino, who are representing the affected workers in a private action.

Correction: In a petition filed with the Federal Trade Commission on July 11, CDT incorrectly identified Quality Transportation Services of Ashland, Virginia as a respondent. The petition has since been amended to include the name of the actual intended respondent, Quality Terminal Services of Cicero, Illinois, and to remove that of Quality Transportation Services. To CDT’s knowledge, Quality Transportation Services has no involvement whatsoever in the activities addressed in the petition. The petitioners regret the error.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Consumer Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.