A woman has sued a North Georgia company, alleging that she was rejected for a job because the firm provided information as part of a background check for the prospective employer, which she claims violated federal law.
In a complaint filed May 20 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Kate Moore, 35, accused Blairsville-based Facts on Demand of breaking the law by selling a report that included information about her that the company is forbidden to pass along.
The company violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act, said Andrew Weiner, an attorney for Moore. “It looks like the company doesn’t have a procedure in place to exclude the information required to be excluded by federal law.”
Facts on Demand did not respond to a request for comment.
According to Moore’s complaint, she had applied for a warehouse position in late 2022 with Impact OutSourcing Solutions, a Griffin company. As part of the Impact’s standard evaluation of potential workers, in November it purchased a report on Moore’s criminal record from Facts on Demand.
Background checks are commonly used by U.S. employers, landlords, banks and other lenders as a way to vet applicants for jobs, promotions, apartments and loans. More than 70% of employers do a background check on every new employee before they’re hired, according to a survey by CareerBuilder.com.
The most common concern among those employers is a criminal record, CareerBuilder said.
While the practice is widespread, federal law puts some limits on what a reporting company can include in its reports.
For example, an evaluation can include all convictions for various crimes, whenever they occurred. And a report can include arrests and charges that did not lead to conviction — but only if they happened in the previous seven years.
Moore alleges that Facts on Demand scooped up a trove of information about her and sent it to her prospective employer without screening out prohibited elements. Most importantly, there were in that report some incidents that were more than seven years old. Among them was an arrest for marijuana possession of less than one ounce and an arrest for obstructing a police officer, both of which were dismissed without a conviction, according to Moore.
While background checks are nearly ubiquitous, a job applicant or employee often has no idea what is in the background report commissioned by the company.
However, if that information is the reason they were turned down for a job, promotion or loan, then the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires their employer or prospective employer to provide them with a copy of the report.
Once the company has provided that copy, the company is in compliance with the law, Weiner said. That is true even if the information in the report is inaccurate or if the report includes details that should have been added — so long as the company did not know of the errors.
Moore’s attorneys believe that the apparent mistake in her report was not a unique issue, but was due to the way the company gathers material. That is, data was scooped up but not screened — at least not sufficiently, her attorneys said. That could mean many people were harmed by reports that should have excluded old information.
So Moore’s attorneys are asking that the complaint be assigned class-action status to embrace anyone whose records were researched by Facts on Demand, Weiner said. “That will be up to the judge.”
If class-action status is approved, Moore’s attorneys would ask that Facts on Demand be ordered to provide the list of people on whom it has provided reports, Weiner said.
