A policy is a set of background check specific toggles, crime categories and offense group conditions that define how the Evident platform will execute your business's background check. Let's talk about how this works in more detail.
Background Check Policy Results
First, we need to understand what results are possible from the background check. The background check leverages the policy, which is the Evident decisioning engine for assessing whether or not an individual's criminal history results will be assessed as "Policy Violations Found" or as "Clear." A "Clear" outcome is generally considered a "passed" background check while a "Policy Violations Found" result is generally considered a "failed" background check.
General Toggles
The general background check toggles that can be associated with the policy are:
- Wait for Identity Document Verification - ON/OFF
- Criminal Monitoring - ON/OFF
- Preadverse/Adverse Action Email Notifications - ON/OFF
- Background Check Product/Service - Basic, Standard, Pro, Pro Comprehensive
These toggles are set in Step 2 of Policy Configuration.
Offense Group Rules
An offense group rule is an outline of conditions applied to a list of crime categories, which together designate whether an applicant's criminal history as returned by the background check will flag a policy violation.
[Offense Group Conditions] + [List of Crimes Selected] = [Offense Group Rule]
First, we'll define the offense group conditions. Then, we'll briefly describe the list of crimes. Finally, we'll identify how these two components combine to create the Offense Group Rule.
Offense Group Conditions
The Offense Group Conditions are set of conditions that must be met in order for the Evident decisioning engine to evaluate an applicant's criminal history as containing a policy violation.
There are four conditions that can be set.
- Count of Offense: The quantity of separate records that must exist
- Severity of Offense: Whether misdemeanors, felonies or both will be assessed
- Age of Offense: Number (of years) that defines how old a qualifying record can be
- Disposition of Offense: Whether only records with guilty dispositions will trigger a policy violation or whether records with guilty or pending dispositions will trigger a policy violation
When these four conditions are combined with the list of crimes, they create the "Offense Group Rule".
List of Crime Categories Selected
Evident leverages the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) crime classification system in order to generate a list of approximately 60 crime categories that you may select (or deselect) in order to create your offense group. When the four conditions defined above are applied to the list of crimes selected, they create the "Offense Group Rule."
When a Policy Violation is Triggered
A policy violation is triggered when the offense group rule is met. The Offense Group Rule is always applied to the results set produced by the background check.
The formula for creating the Offense Group Rule is:
A policy violation will be found when the background check results contain at least [Offense Count] [Offense Severity] of [List of Crimes Selected] within the last [Age of Offense] years where the disposition is [Offense Disposition].
Let's look at an example of how the offense group conditions combine with the list of crime categories selected to create the offense group rule when applied to the default product selections.
Here are the default Offense Group Conditions.
- Count of Offense: 1
- Severity of Offense: Either Felony or Misdemeanor
- Age of Offense: 7
- Disposition of Offense: Guilty Dispositions Only
By default, all crime categories are pre-selected to create the "List of Crimes Selected."
Here is the rule that is created as a result of applying these Offense Group Conditions to the List of Crimes Selected.
A policy violation will be found when the background check results contain at least 1 felony or misdemeanor of any crime category within the last 7 years where the disposition is guilty.
Here is another example. Let's say that a business selected shoplifting, DUI, and petty theft as the List of Crimes Selected for this offense group. Here are the conditions the example business sets for the offense group:
- Offense Count: 5
- Offense Severity: Misdemeanors Only
- Age of Offense: 3
- Offense Disposition: Guilty Dispositions Only
Here is our formula for the Offense Group Rule:
A policy violation will be found when the background check results contain at least [Offense Count] [Offense Severity] of [List of Crimes Selected] within the last [Age of Offense] years where the disposition is [Offense Disposition].
Therefore, here is the rule for our example business:
A policy violation will be found when the background check results contain at least five (5) misdemeanors of shoplifting, DUI or petty theft within the last 3 years where the disposition is guilty.
Let's take this example further. Say that an applicant (we'll call her Mary) has a criminal history returned by the background check where she committed a string of eight (8) incidents that were all either shoplifting, DUI or petty theft. Only three (3) incidents occurred within the last three (3) years and were adjudicated as guilty. In this scenario, a policy violation would not be flagged because there were not five (5) separate counts within the last three (3) years, which is the minimum threshold set by the business to flag a policy violation. Instead, only three (3) of the total number of incidents were committed within the three (3) year Age of Offense window.
However, let's say that Mary returns to her life of crime and commits four (4) additional incidents of shoplifting within a year and is adjudicated as guilty for all of them. Now, when we run the same background check policy using Mary's data, the policy will return "Policy Violations Found" since her record as returned by the background check now surpasses the five (5) count threshold, with seven (7) total counts of shoplifting, DUI or petty theft within the last three years. In addition, her background check would still return as "Policy Violations Found" if the count were exactly five (5).
Multiple offense groups can be active at one time, but it's important to think through how different offense group conditions may override one another.