by Employers who take certain kinds of employment actions based on background checks have a new form to use in meeting their compliance obligations.
When employers are considering an adverse employment action based on a background check report, they must follow a process required under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). The pre-adverse/adverse action process includes providing the applicant or employee with a summary of rights under the FCRA. One of the most common adverse employment actions is seeking to withdraw a conditional job offer based on the information in the report.
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the agency overseeing background screening processes, maintains a standardized summary of rights for employers to use. Due to an administrative rule change, updated contact information and other changes needed to be made to the form, and on March 17, 2023, the agency published a revised form. Many employers have begun to use the new notice, even though the rule that mandates the use of it has an effective date of March 20, 2024.
Those employers who immediately incorporated the new notice as published initially will need to backtrack. The March 17th version of the notice is missing a required phone number for applicants and workers to use when seeking to opt out of getting prescreened offers of credit and insurance based on their credit report. Employers should use the corrected form as found at https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/bcfp_consumer-rights-summary_2018-09.pdf.
