Pre Employment Background Screening Blog

Oscar Antonio Ortiz, a Border Patrol employee, was arrested last month when he was discovered to be an illegal alien. As a result of the arrest, the Border Patrol has made changes to its employment background screening process to prevent an event like this from occurring again. Prior to the changes, applications for Border Patrol positions would be sent to the Office of Personnel Management, an agency which handles background checks for nearly all federal jobs. The federal agency utilizes both internal staff and outside contractors to perform its background checks. In this particular case, the results had been forwarded to the INS. When the information Ortiz provided on his application couldn’t be verified in a government database of births and deaths, he was asked to provide proof of citizenship. He managed to bypass the safeguard by producing a forged birth certificate. Today, all prospective employees for the Border Patrol are now required to provide birth certificates which are checked independently with the issuing agency or a database. This story highlights the importance of document verification. If you simply rely on documents provided by the applicant, you can't prevent people from using forged documents to obtain employment. Other examples of forgeries that we encounter are diplomas. That's why, at Inquest Screening, we verify the validity of a degree by contacting the school directly and ensuring that the institution is recongized as an accredited school.