After spending several years on a waiting list for a subsidized apartment in Tennessee, "Jack" says he was turned away by a leasing amanuensis when incorrect information turned upwards in a routine background check.

"She's like, 'Y'all have a sex offender charge on your record,' and I was shocked," says Jack, who requested that we not use his real proper noun to avoid having it further associated with the erroneous allegation. "I never accept been charged with that."

The agent showed Jack a copy of the report, which referred to a man with a similar name and birthdate, he says. The report also included a photo of the alleged sex offender, who the leasing agent acknowledged clearly wasn't him. (Among other things, the man pictured had conspicuous face tattoos.)

But Jack still lost his spot on the waitlist—he'southward currently staying with a relative—and had a separate housing awarding besides declined because of the mistaken information. Every bit he tries to correct the record and articulate up the confusion, every day is a new day of limbo.

Vidhi Joshi, an chaser at the Legal Aid Guild of Center Tennessee and the Cumberlands who is representing Jack, filed a formal dispute with the screening company that included the declared offender's moving picture simply hasn't yet received a response. She has also requested a copy of the study used for the second rental awarding, which was issued by a different background check firm, she says. (Joshi declined to place the firms involved, since their responses are still awaiting).

Jack's story is but ane of what fair credit advocates say is a growing number of cases where wrong information on criminal and other background checks is making it difficult for innocent people to find piece of work and housing. Such checks are routinely required for employment and rental applications, and conducted with varying levels of diligence by hundreds of companies around the state, but they only work properly when the information they contain is authentic.

And, increasingly, that's not the instance.

"We accept gone from back in the early part of the century seeing a couple hundred [cases] near criminal records a year up to more than a thousand a year," says Sharon Dietrich, litigation manager at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia and head of the legal assist grouping's employment unit.

Digitizing data similar court records has made background checks significantly cheaper and faster than in years gone by: In 2012, a Society for Human Resource Direction survey found that more than two-thirds of organizations polled conducted criminal background checks on job candidates.

"I think employers are scared non to practice it because they feel similar they may be establish liable for negligent hiring," says Dietrich.

But regulation has non necessarily kept pace. Even some jurisdictions that have passed and so-called "ban the box" legislation, which forbids employers from requiring potential hires to indicate on job applications whether they've been convicted of a crime, still allow criminal history checks subsequently in the application process.

Companies typically employ a tertiary-party background screening service to verify the work and didactics histories of potential hires, and often to bank check a candidate's credit history and search for whatever criminal convictions that might serve equally a cerise flag, says Mike Aitken, vice president of government diplomacy at SHRM.

According to a May report from business intelligence firm IBISWorld, the $2 billion groundwork check industry is by and large composed of small, local firms, which have benefited from piece of cake internet access to more and more public records. Fear of liability for employee misconduct and post-9/11 security concerns have also contributed to rapid growth in the industry in contempo years, according to the National Clan of Professional Background Screeners, an industry grouping which counts more than 850 groundwork screening companies as members.

And while the bulk of checks are likely authentic, Dietrich says she'due south seen a "good number" of cases where background reports include information about people with similar names to her clients. In ane instance, she says, a client with a common name received a study with 65 pages of criminal history data about unrelated people with like names.

"I have fifty-fifty seen cases where a female's record is attributed to a male person or vice versa, simply because they don't use gender information, fifty-fifty though they accept it," she says.

The Devil In The Details

Fifty-fifty job applicants who practise have criminal histories tin even so exist unfairly harmed by slipshod groundwork checks. Often, convictions legally expunged by a court still prove upwards on reports. Crimes tin also exist misclassified, such as when misdemeanors are erroneously labeled as felonies, Dietrich says.

One problem is over-reliance on commercial databases, which can contain incomplete information or return hits based on faux matches, says Larry Lambeth, the president of screening firm Employment Screening Services.

Lambeth is also the founder of Concerned CRAs, an association of consumer reporting agencies, every bit screening companies are known nether federal law, voluntarily adhering to sure ethical standards. The group requires its members to consult original documents, like courtroom records, and compare data like birthdates and addresses to verify information from databases really corresponds to the field of study of a background cheque.

"If you utilise a database for his criminal records, if y'all find a hitting, we crave that yous pull a criminal record from the courthouse and notice the identifiers and ensure it's the right person," he says.

But not all background screeners conduct such rigorous enquiry, and not all clients are willing to pay for information technology, he says. And even well-intentioned screeners can have difficulty verifying records in jurisdictions where privacy-minded courts redact personal data similar addresses and dates of birth, says Melissa Sorenson, executive director of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners.

"It's extending the time frame of getting people to work," she says, since it takes screeners longer to complete reports for employers. The organization generally tries to work with country and local regulators to make sure groundwork screeners have access to the data they need to practise their jobs, she says.

Nether the federal Fair Credit Reporting Human activity, applicants do have the legal right to receive copies of their background checks and to contest whatsoever inaccuracies with the agencies that did the screening. Simply in practice, critics say the process can exist arduous fifty-fifty for experts, let alone for individuals looking to correct their own records. Dietrich says she's had a screening firm resist providing her with an address to send mail on behalf of a client.

"Y'all have to know even where to look—look for a lilliputian link at the bottom [of a firm'south website] that says 'consumers,' and perhaps that's where you'll discover the dispute procedures," says Dietrich. And those procedures frequently require documentation similar proof of address that not anybody can easily provide, she says.

"Some people tin do that, some people tin't, especially my clients who tend to be low-income and on the move," she says.

Fifty-fifty in cases where data is obtained directly from government sources, it tin even so be incorrect or out of date: Erstwhile U.S. Attorney Full general Eric Holder, now a partner at police firm Covington & Burling, wrote letters on behalf of Uber to local legislators earlier this year, urging them not to require ride-hailing services to vet their drivers confronting the Federal Bureau of Investigation's fingerprint database.

Critics have long said that the FBI database, which many states utilize to vet childcare workers, health intendance professionals, and others in regulated occupations, often contains wrong, misleading, or incomplete data. The database contains arrest records from law enforcement agencies around the country but just includes final case outcome data roughly half the time, according to a 2013 written report from the National Employment Law Projection. That means that arrests that resulted in an amortization, dropped charges, or even expunged records tin can essentially appear every bit unresolved.

And updating outdated or simply incorrect data in the FBI's files can be laborious and tin can leave jobseekers out of work while they reach out to multiple agencies to get the information fixed, says Maurice Emsellem, director of the NELP'due south Admission and Opportunity Plan.

"Basically, yous accept to become back to the state that created the record to go information technology fixed," he says. "The FBI won't fix it in the FBI organization."

And while reforms to the FBI background cheque system have been proposed equally part of bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation, they've still to go far through Congress.

Nor, says Dietrich, take regulators addressed issues that have arisen around private background checks in the more than 45 years since the Fair Credit Reporting Act became law, such equally how groundwork screeners should handle tape matching issues in computerized databases or how they should bargain with potentially expunged cases.

"The world of regulation of these companies is not what information technology might be," she says.

Meanwhile, the hope of future regulation is cold comfort for home-seekers like Jack, whose lives are being immediately damaged by bad data in a information-obsessed world. "He has suffered from homelessness," Joshi says. "It's had a pretty big impact."