If background checks were run on bulls, you probably wouldn’t hire Bodacious for rides at your child’s next birthday party. Bodacious has been described by some in the bull riding community as the meanest, most dangerous bull that ever was.

Fortunately, the identity of bulls with a history of violence is readily attainable, probably through some kind of bull riding database available to those in the industry. Or wikipedia.

When it comes to identifying humans with a history of violence, we can run criminal background checks. We do this for employee applicants and often for independent contractors. When using staffing agencies, we ask the agencies to run background checks for their employees before sending them to perform services onsite at our businesses.

Except that a recent Court of Appeal ruling in California may have just broken the criminal background check process throughout the state.

In a case called All of Us or None, the Fourth District Court of Appeal ruled that it violates the California Rules of Court, Rule 2.507(c), for Superior Courts to maintain criminal case databases that are searchable by date of birth or driver’s license number.

Wait, what?

If you want to run a criminal background check, you need additional identifying information such as date of birth or driver’s license number. There are thousands of people with identical surnames and similar sounding full names. According to mynamestats.com, there are 81,585 Californians with the surname Gomez, and 5,277 of them are named Maria Gomez. Check out this map to go down a state-by-state rabbit hole. Background check companies need additional identifying information to make sure they’re reporting on the right person.

Rule 2.507(c) says that certain types of information must be excluded from “court calendars, indexes, and registers of actions.” Taking a waaaay-broad interpretation of this rule, the Court of Appeal held that the “excluded” categories can’t be used at all, not even when searching for criminal records. Other “excluded” categories of information include such important differentiators as ethnicity, age, and gender. The Riverside Superior Court, defending the legality of its searchable database, argued that Rule 2.507(c) is intended to prevent people from searching for the excluded information in a database, but it cannot possibly be intended to prohibit searches when the searcher already knows that information.

The Court of Appeal disagreed.

Under federal law, a background check company must maintain reasonable procedures to ensure that the information they report is accurate. Using names alone would obviously produce absurdly unreliable results. Just ask anyone named Maria Gomez. Most Maria Gomezes are undoubtedly wonderful people and don’t want their background check reports to show that some other Bad Maria got into criminal trouble. But if a background check company cannot use important identifying and differentiating information it already knows to help verify someone’s identity and criminal record, how can it provide reliable reports in California at all?

I’m not sure how that’s gonna work. Leave it to California to break the whole background check system. We’ll see if the courts and background check companies find a way around this.

Meanwhile, if you’re running background checks in applicants or independent contractors in California, expect some delays, thanks to this ruling. And if you’re planning to have livestock at your child’s next birthday, may I suggest a pony?

© 2021 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.