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Washington,
DC—Testifying on behalf of LPA, Harold Morgan, Senior Human Resources Vice President for Bally Total Fitness, today urged the House Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit to "recognize the enormous pressures and expectations on today's employer" in providing a safe and secure workplace. In a hearing on the role of the Fair Credit Reporting Act in employee background checks, Mr. Morgan suggested that, if any changes to FCRA are to occur, they should facilitate the ability of employers to consider criminal histories of applicants for sensitive positions.
Mr. Morgan described the importance of background checks to his own company, which employs 5,000 personal trainers and 1,000 child care employees. One of the problems Mr. Morgan highlighted in his testimony is a recent trend among the states to limit employer access to and consideration of criminal records. The threat such laws pose to the public was recently illustrated in Washington, DC, by a former school counselor who has been charged with forcing a student to have sex with him in exchange for changing her grades. In hiring the counselor, the school had been prohibited by D.C. law from considering a previous rape charge against the individual because it had resulted in a hung jury, with no conviction.
In his testimony, Mr. Morgan cautions against adding any new restrictions under FCRA to employment background checks that would "impede the process of obtaining essential information in a timely manner" and suggests certain improvements as well—
- for employers who comply with FCRA, creating a safe harbor against state laws restricting access and consideration of criminal histories of applicants;
- passing bipartisan legislation—H.R. 1543—that would exempt from FCRA third-party investigations of sexual harassment and other workplace misconduct;
- removing or extending FCRA's seven-year limit on criminal records and other "adverse information" (other than credit information) that may be reported to the employer by a consumer reporting agency; and
- a study of the effects of restrictions against employer access to centralized databases on criminal records maintained by the federal government.
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