… and other Practical Applications of the Background Check

Behavior is a function of personality. Personality is fixed in early childhood, and is normally constant over time.  Hence, behaviors are repeated. Some could kill you.

          65% of convicted adult felons are rearrested or disciplined for probation violations within three years of first arrest. 45% of chronic juvenile offenders (5 or more arrests before 18 years of age) become chronic adult offenders.

          Problem is, you can’t tell by looking at a guy if he has raped or molested, or if he is prone to violence.  But you can look for indicators — clues to potential antisocial behavior.

Where to Look

Antisocial behavior can be revealed by public records, e.g., criminal and civil proceedings, eduation, frequence of address changes and employment, bankrupticies, liens, and judgments. Credit face sheets may reveal behavior that society in general and your firm in particular find unacceptable. We could teach you how to do this, or we could do it for you Pitorri and Associates, LLC.

Why It Works

Simply put, past behavior indicates future behavior; the past may be a portent. How a new hire has behaved during, let’s say, the last 7 to 10 years is, in all likelihood, how he or she will behave in your workplace.

How to Make It Better

During a process called adjudication, you (or we) consider the information available from the applicant’s resume, the application, the interview, and the Background Check. A Background Check is designed to

     (1) Verify information that the candidate has entered in the application for employment

     (2) Identify and clarify discrepancies

     (3) Provide the employer with timely, factual information to support a hiring decision.

Who Can Do This?

You can. If you require that the candidates

     (1) complete their applications in the presence of one of your employees

     (2) answer every question

     (3) sign and date the application in ink

     (4) present documentation to prove legal residence

     (5) conduct a good and proper background check, either in-house or by hiring a professional firm.

          You can avoid personal tragedy and exposure to liability by identifying those personality attributes that portend unsuitability or violence in your workplace.

Employer, You Are Responsible!

You, the employer, have the right and the obligation to ensure that you provide your employees and your clients with a safe workplace; that you are hiring persons whose emotional stability, reliability, and trustworthiness are such that entrusting them with the care or assets of other people is clearly in the best interest of those people.

Other Useful Applications

Do You Date?

Don’t date blind. Have you ever had a concern that Mr. Perfect (or Ms Dreamy) may be married, may have a criminal record — or is who he says he is? How much is peace of mind worth? You could do a mini-background check.

Mommies and Daddies….

Do you feel some anxiety when you hire a caregiver for your child? Do you take the time to check credentials and criminal records and SSN and legal status and… well, you get the idea.

Child Support

Deadbeat Dads can be found, along with their assets www.pitorriassociates.com/services/assetsearching.html, as long as you don’t wait too long. As I pointed out in another blog, nowadays bad guys take lessons in how to stay hidden, and they may (unlawfully) transfer assets overseas.

Lawyers use this useful tool to verify information provided by witnesses prior to trial, verify the background and credentials of expert witnesses, and even to verify information given in sworn depositions. (Yes, people do lie under oath.)

…. or we can find them for you ( Pitorri and Associates, LLC). Here is what it’s all about. Let’s say you are a paralegal or a lawyer considering legal action against a real or corporate person. You certainly need to know that if you win, you will be able to enforce the judgment. This would apply whether you are engaged in a divorce settlement or a collection action.

3 Classes of Assets

The first consists of assets which by law are in public record. These would include motor vehicle ownership, real estate, aircraft, large boats, or a business. Business transactions (covered by the Uniform Commercial Code) are by law public record.  All are recoverable through searches of public records.

          The second class, or type of assets are those which are semi-private. One example would be credit cards (and yes, they are assets, as they contain a credit line). These are identifiable on a credit header report. This is not a consumer credit report, containing personal information such as SSN, DOB, account numbers, etc. The header contains only basic information about credit granted and outstanding.

         The third class of assets consists of bank accounts, bank credit lines, safe deposit boxes, trademarks, patents, etc. These are obtainable (legally) through major information providers.

3 Reasons to Hide Those Assets

Assets Unlawfully Hidden. Money laundering is the conversion of cash from criminal activities into funds with an ostensible legal source. Congress passed the Money Laundering Control Act PL 99-570 in 1986.  

         Like the businessman who bankrupted his business and then stiffed his attorney for $78,000 in legal fees, incurred prior to the proceedings. The attorney ordered an asset search. We ran property searches, finding a house in his name and his wife’s name, and another house in his name alone. We checked further, and found him to be on the boards of two healthy corporations. We ran a Regional Bank Search. In a different asset search (different source), we found two accounts in his name, and one in his wife’s name, in a state other than the one in which he bankrupted. His estate had liquid assets over $450,000, plus the real property.

Assets Hidden By Spouse. This happens, for example, in family law where the defendant (respondent) wants to claim a paucity of assets to avoid sharing his wealth with an about-to-be divorced spouse. Many of these assets may be on the way to offshore accounts. An asset search using multiple sources could locate, for example, real estate recently sold, as well as real estate just put on the market. A sale alert would inform us when the property has closed.

         Case in point: We recently located a skip and learned that he had transferred real property and other attachables (such as antique cars) to a spouse. That was a sure sign that we had a deadbeat on our hands. While his credit cards showed recent and continuing use (go figure!), he was not repaying unsecured loans from three banks.

Assets Held By A Defendant In A Personal Injury Case. You want to know that a case will be worth litigation. Those assets would have to be attachable, so a 10-year-old car would not help in satisfying a judgment, while a 10-year-old house would. (Okay, in today’s world…it might not!)

Who Are You Gonna Call?

Well, for sure, you will not be able to locate assets by going online — except for those in public record. So call firms that advertise that service. Talk with each for a few minutes: 

• Does the person sound like she knows what she is talking about?
• Does the firm negotiate fees? (If it does, move on; they do cut-rate, unprofessional work.)
• Does the firm offer, and require a contract? (You have the right to expect that.)
• Does the firm guarantee results? If it does, move on. Think a minute: What results could they possibly guarantee?
• Finally, you should examine their brochure and their professional credentials. What does your gut tell you?

          Call us. Take a look at our website, and then give us a call: www.pitorriassociates.com.

…. when you try to find someone. You could just go to one of the social media sites. Or you could even put a person’s first and last name into Google, and come up with a wealth of information. (Try mine peter pitorri and see what you get!) On the other hand, how easy it is to find a person depends on many factors.

           Let’s talk about those factors before we get to the Mistakes. The first factor is Why. Why are you looking for that person? If it is because you want to hook up with a former classmate, chances are you will find her quickly. If, on the other hand, you are a business person or a law firm, looking for someone who has skipped on a debt, your search may range far and wide before you locate the skip.

         In today’s world, people are actually studying the methods of skip tracers, in order to hide from those tracers. Are they dishonest? Of course they are: they purposely run up debts in the thousands, and then don’t pay up.  Notice I said “purposely”. I am not talking about the victims of our economy, who have been paying faithfully for many years, and who have now run upon bad times. I am referring to those lying, cheating, n’er-do-wells who are taking advantage of the system.

First Mistake: Using online sources that advertise “free” searches. They lie. Those searches are not free. Do not take my word for it; give it a try. See how far you get before you have to pay up. Then, who knows, maybe your search will be successful. Or maybe you will wind up with old information, from a database that has not been updated in at least a year. When you run down the lead, you learn that the person is no longer at that address, or no longer has that phone number, so what do you do? Start all over.

How to do it better? Pay a professional skip tracer to do it for you.

Second Mistake: Forgetting (or not being aware) that there is one type of phone number that cannot be traced: The disposable mobile phone — you know, the one you buy in a store. There is no registration for that type of phone, so there is no paper trail.  Why is this a mistake? Because while land lines and cell phones can yield name, current address, and sometimes other data, a trapped phone number belonging to a disposable phone yields no usable information. By the way, all skip tracing is based on paper trails.

How to fix it? Talk with a professional skip tracer to get an idea of what other sources you can use.

         For your information, the best information  (meaning the most recent or even current) comes from utilities, but that’s another story. Meanwhile, here is a caveat: If a skip tracer tells you that he gets his information directly from a utility, you may want to find another tracer. It is unlawful for utilities to provide personal data about their customers to unauthorized recipients.

Third Mistake: Not using multiple sources. You may remember that we went to war in Iraq because Bush relied on one source (an unvetted one, at that) for his intel on nukes in Iraq. Cops, intel analysts, reporters — they all use more than one source to check information. Believe me, it saves time in the long run!

How to do it right: PITORRI and ASSOCIATES, LLC