Background Check Issue

TLCTX · August 2011

We are in the process of hiring an applicant, and did a background check that included criminal, history in inquiries, etc. Something strange came up - a completely different name matching the social. I'm not really sure how to handle this - has anyone come across this, and how did you handle it?

Thanks for any help!

mickeysgrl · August 2011

I've had that happen at our office a few times before. We use a third party vendor for our backgrounds and when that happened, we verified the SSN with the applicant first. Then asked if they know anyone by that name and explained the reason why we are asking. We give them the contact information for the Social Security Administration and for the background vendor so they can work directly with them to get more detail and provide whatever is needed for those agencies to correct the issue. Our background vendor will re-run the SSN and remove any erroneous names from their screening results.

jenwiehl · October 2011

Better late than never, right? This is actually a fairly common occurrence and one your background check company should have answered for you. The SSN Traces typically come from public records and it's not terribly unusual to have errors. In fact, I have a person who shows up on my trace and their SSN (as I found out) is one digit off from mine, so that tells me that somewhere down the line someone misreported my information. Very seldom do we see what we could determine as true identity theft - more often than not, it's a data entry error that will work it's way out in time. There isn't anything the Social Security Administration will be able to help with or even the credit bureau, unless identity theft is really going on.

Jen

Background Check Issue

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