In his 10 years in dirty laundry, Chris Dyer has seen it all, investigating the backgrounds of between 200,000 and 333,000 individuals by his reckoning.
The trend of late is an epidemic of lying.
“Given the recession, we”™ve seen a dramatic increase in the last year of applicants who have gone off the path with telling the truth,” he said from his Liberty Alliance Inc. office in Orange County, Calif. His company counts clients throughout the tristate region, notably “a lot in New York City,” north to Pine Bush and the Capital District, and extensively in Fairfield County, Conn.
“People say they have a certain degree and they don”™t,” Dyer, 35 and the company CEO, said with the surety of someone who will find you. “They say they were a manager when they weren”™t. They”™re taking a big chance with their reputations.”
He”™ll check you out for as little as $10 to $15 or he”™ll put you through the wringer for $250 ”“ the Platinum Plan. Contracts, he acknowledges, cross a broad spectrum of applicant numbers and depth of curiosity. As he spoke, the ink had just dried on a deal to investigate would-be West Coast EMTs.
It can be funny at times, he says: “You would not believe the level to which people will misrepresent themselves on a resume. For our own employees  who have just started, some of it can be funny for perhaps the first hundred. The level of dishonesty; they can”™t believe it.”
The danger could not be clearer. The new hire who has lied and who is now in over his or her head or an under-qualified manager or a big rig driver with a checkered driving record in another state.
Dyer puts great stock in human contact, chatting up contacts. He knows, he says, the value of spoken inflection and the value of how questions are asked. “You get people talking.”
Dyer is adamant: “We don’t report infractions.” He tells the story of an investigative source who made accusations of theft: a cell phone, a vehicle. Anything else to note? “Yeah, he dated my daughter twice.” The plot thickens. “There’s often more to what someone might have done to get in trouble ”“ more to the story.” Amateur sleuths, he said, infer too much and often incorrectly.
Dyer and his operatives ”“ researchers ”“ do not know the hundreds of thousands of applicants they investigate. And that, said Dyer, is the reason his methods work so well. “We don’t know the applicant. We don”™t mind asking the hard questions.” Including, if it”™s called for, drug testing.
For 3,000 Liberty Alliance researchers, the badly lighted world of official records is home. “The courts remain a primary source. They”™re a hot spot.”
Some employers shy away from those convicted of misdemeanors. Yet a misdemeanor in one state might by a citation in another, Dyer said. And there are nuances in the modern world of education he works to decipher. An Ivy League diploma is easy enough to both verify and to respect, but degrees today come from many institutions that are new to education and that are wedded to the Internet, some are excellent, some are diploma mills, and most of them, lacking football teams, are unknown to the general public.
In-house background checks tend to focus on law enforcement records. Dyer calls such records a solid source of information and one Liberty Alliance uses as a matter of business.
But what about a shoddy driving record? That’s DMV. And federal offenses do not appear in local criminal databases, Dyer said. Care to know a credit rating? His firm ”“ now 15 full-time from “a handful” in 2001 ”“ draws the line at fingerprint work. Whatever thoughts laymen might harbor about the free flow of secret information, Dyer said the FBI”™s fingerprint files are not available to him and he does not seek them.
Dyer figures his company has made a million serious inquiries in the name of getting the low-down on job seekers. His work is primarily business-to-business.
Dyer’s crew will give you the once over. Questions will get asked. Maybe tough questions. And ”“ Dyer stresses this ”“ by dispassionate gatherers of data. The rosy news: Hey, they might find something to spring you or land you that paycheck.
