We reported in December 2004 on a Financial Services Authority report into financial firms, that warned of shortcomings in checks on recruits. This interview comes from the January 2005 print magazine.
On the wider subject of checking staff, we had a chat with Alan Beazley, Director of the employee screening division at consultants The Risk Advisory Group (TRAG).
Is vetting and checking the ‘forgotten’ security measure because it is intangible unlike gates, CCTV and so on? we asked first. To an extent, Alan replied. In TRAG’s view, if companies want to put screening programmes in place, it is a good idea to flag it up to applicants at the earliest opportunity: “We don’t believe there should be anything secretive about the process; quite the contrary.” By setting out the policy, telling short-listed or newly-appointed staff that their backgrounds will be fully verified, it is likely to have a deterrent effect against somebody who is deliberately trying to disguise something.
A threat to HR?
Next question: is there a danger that vetting of possible recruits and checks on existing staff fall between the two stools of security and human resources (HR)? Alan replied that responsibility for such screening programmes do tend to impact on a number of corporate functions: internal or external audit; within the financial services sector, there’s a role for compliance; and corporate security has an interest. In terms of admin, screening may be a HR responsibility. A HR department, though, may find screening a chore and may like to off-load it. Or, HR might see corporate security as a threat, the security department muscling in on HR ability to select and appoint staff. Here Alan mentioned that FSA report. The regulator set out how screening of staff should not be overlooked. In 2004 TRAG noted interest from companies in the consultancy’s screening services, including an IT outsourcing firm; customer call centre; and a company with field-based staff who access residential properties and handle money from customers, and settle accounts – and in that case there is no screening of staff. To Alan that is alarming. It raises the prospect that the plumber or the central heating man coming into your home or your organisation has not been checked, as we might assume.
Onus on agency
The move to outsource or use non-employee labour, whether temps or contractors, brings its own problems, Alan adds: “Because organisations frequently assume if using a company to provide such categories of workers, that the company will check the backgrounds of people. In practice unless you specify they have to do that, they probably won’t do it.” This is despite the fact, Alan adds, that new employment agency regulations put a lot more onus on the agency to carry out such checks.
Not heavy-handed
Generally speaking, screening does not have to be draconian, and need not take forever; and you do check someone is who they say they are, and that someone has an unblemished personal financial record – that is, they do not have county court judgements against them, and they are not bankrupts. And if it is important for the job, you check someone’s academic or professional qualifications; and do some checks on their employment history. None of that, Alan repeats, need be heavy-handed.
A practical difficulty, Alan continues, is what access you can get to criminal records. The Criminal Records Bureau, he says, has still not got its act together to provide basic disclosures – for an individual to show whether there are unspent convictions, or a lack of a criminal record. Nor has the CRB – which covers England and Wales – set a date for introducing such a service. The Department of Transport, Alan adds, seeking such a basic record check for airport workers who go air-side, turned to the CRB equivalent in Scotland, Disclosure Scotland, that does offer basic disclosures. (The CRB and Disclosure Scotland each access the same Police National Computer covering England and Wales, and Scotland.) Alan adds that if he were a smart employer that did not propose to bombard Disclosure Scotland with hundreds of thousands of applications (which would snarl it up), he might make it a condition of employment that an individual should provide a basic disclosure. An individual can buy it on-line, by credit card, for £13.60 (third parties cannot).
Inside agents
Professional Security pointed to articles on haulage crime last issue, that mentioned how all warehouse-related crimes around Heathrow had an inside agent. Alan replied that there is increasing evidence of people being put, by organised crime groups, into jobs in companies, maybe quite low-level positions, and using the access to customer records to carry out identity theft or fraudulent transactions – setting up accounts, or diverting funds. Alan said: “That is worrying, particularly if up to that point the individual has a completely clean record – what can you do in that situation?” Screening alone is not going to catch such an employee; then it must be a question of other layers of security. For instance, line managers and security staff monitoring behaviour: such as the classic suspicious signs of a fraudulent member of staff, who never takes a holiday or turns up for work in a Porsche – that is, staff apparently living way beyond their pay packet. In other words, we are back where we began, with checks on staff as an intangible process. As for Home Secretary David Blunkett’s proposed national identity cards: yes, with a biometric, you can establish more quickly and reliably that the person in front of you is who they say they are. (Assuming that the ID card cannot be faked.) So an ID card will allow a more through identity check than provided by someone showing you a driving licence, but that ID card won’t tell you anything about John Smith’s character.
