- The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act and the supplementary FCRA Plus (California Civil Code § 1786) allow employers to conduct background checks, but also protect some consumer rights. In California, applicants have the right to see the results of the background check conducted by an outside company or the public records portion of an in-house background check.
- California employers must use the Live Scan service to collect your fingerprints and send them for processing. This is a digital fingerprinting that must be conducted by people who are certified to correctly operate the scanner. In most cases, these sites are police stations, government offices and mailing companies. After gathering the fingerprints, the Live Scan service electronically sends them to the California Department of Justice to initiate a search for linked criminal records.
- A job applicant must pay a fingerprint-rolling fee at the time of the fingerprinting. This fee covers the employer's cost to roll the fingerprints and process the forms. The fee varies from one site to another, but is usually between $20 and $30. The employer can require the applicant to pay this fee. The employer usually pays the processing fee to look up state and federal records linked to those fingerprints.
- The information an employer can see in your criminal history varies slightly depending on the type of employer. In general, employers can only see criminal history from California records in the past seven years. In addition, arrests that did not result in convictions and convictions for which you were granted a full pardon do not appear. Some specific types of jobs, including those that require a state license and those that involve working with the elderly or with children, can trigger a more extensive criminal history report, including looking in federal databases.
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