By Gina Kesler, President & CEO, Impact Employee Solutions
Let’s call this what it is: the way the background check industry sells the “national criminal search” as a standalone product is irresponsible, misleading, and flat-out wrong.
The national criminal database was never designed to be an all-county, all-knowing criminal history search. Yet background check companies continue to brand it that way because it’s cheap, fast and easy to sell. And employers, either uninformed or willfully ignorant, keep buying it. The result? Bad hiring decisions, legal exposure, and a black eye on an industry that should know better.
What a “national criminal search” actually is
A national criminal search is not a court search. It is a collection of privately maintained trade databases that aggregate criminal record information from thousands of sources—public websites, data brokers, corrections feeds and scraped records. These databases do not pull directly from county courthouses. They are not updated consistently, often lack dispositions and regularly contain outdated, incomplete or flat-out incorrect data.
In other words, these data should never be trusted on their own.
The industry knows this – which is why the national criminal search historically was used as a pointer tool, not a decision-making tool. Its sole purpose is to flag potential jurisdictions where a record might exist so a Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA) can go to the actual courthouse and verify identity, accuracy, and disposition.
The bundled smoke screen
To make this product more attractive, vendors bundle it with other components:
- Alias/Name Search: Identifies name variations tied to a Social Security number. Useful, but only as an investigative aid.
- Address Trace: Pulls historical addresses associated with an SSN so county searches can be properly dispatched. When used correctly, this is the backbone of jurisdictional screening.
- Sex Offender Search: A multi-jurisdictional database search that also suffers from the same lag, accuracy, and verification issues as national criminal data.
Bundling these together does not magically turn garbage data into a comprehensive criminal history. It just makes it easier for CRAs to ingest data quickly—and easier for employers to misunderstand what they’re buying.
The dangerous lie: “All-county search”
Calling a national criminal search an “all-county” search is B.S. branding – full stop.
There is no such thing as an all-county criminal search unless you are physically going county by county, pulling records from jurisdictions known to be current and reliable. Anything else is marketing nonsense designed to lower cost and increase volume.
Worse, many CRAs show this unverified trade data directly to employers and allow hiring decisions to be made from it. That’s where the real liability starts.
Enter the FCRA and the 613 letter
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, if an employer intends to take adverse action based on public record information from a third-party database, they must provide what is commonly referred to as a Section 613 disclosure.
A 613 letter informs the candidate that public record information obtained from third-party sources may be used in employment decisions and that they have the right to dispute inaccuracies. Some companies treat this as legal cover.
It isn’t.
If you’re making employment decisions based on unverified, outdated, trade-database garbage, a disclosure letter doesn’t save you. It just documents that you did something you shouldn’t have in the first place.
Employers: Stop being cheap
If you won’t spend $300–$500 to screen properly someone you’re about to put on payroll—with salary, benefits, access, and liability—don’t act surprised when it blows up in your face.
A real prescreen includes:
- Verified county and state criminal searches
- Identity validation
- Employment and education verification
- Resume gap analysis
That’s not optional. That’s due diligence.
Spending $50 on a checkbox search and calling it “risk mitigation” is how lawsuits happen.
CRAs: Do better
Any background check company selling a national criminal search as a standalone product without education, guardrails, and transparency is running a bad business model. Period.
We should be partners to employers—not transactional vendors pushing cheap products to win deals. If you’re not questioning how an employer plans to use the data, you’re part of the problem.
And employers? Learn what’s behind the report—or stop running them altogether.
No more excuses. No more bad data. No more pretending this is acceptable.