WELLINGTON - Pre-employment checks, including a prospective employee's credit rating, are commonly made - and should be by prudent employers, a top private investigator says.
Trevor Morley, a former police officer who runs Morley Security and Investigation Group, was responding to a complaint about an Upper Hutt supermarket requiring prospective employees
to undergo a credit check.
A woman who had applied to the supermarket for a job complained about the credit check and questioned the relevancy of it to her ability to do the job.
The credit check has also been condemned by the National Distribution Union.
But Mr Morley said any employer worth his or her salt would find out about a prospective employee's criminal, traffic and credit record.
"The necessity to find out about their past is the way of predicting the future."
He said he knew several cases where employers had failed to check the backgrounds of employees, with potentially disastrous consequences.
"There is the case of a man who was convicted of raping an 80-year-old woman who got a job in a nursing home.
"Another case involved a salesman who had previous convictions for dishonesty who stole tens of thousands of dollars from his employer. The judge at sentencing said he was surprised no one had done a background check on the salesman."
Mr Morley said his company had been contracted to carry out background checks on many employees.
The union said a paragraph in the supermarket's job-application form breached the Privacy Act. The paragraph said: "I further irrevocably authorise you to furnish any third-party details of this application and any subsequent dealings that I may have with you as a result of this application being actioned by you."
Regional secretary Marian Cadman said the form was outrageous and the union would take the issue up with the supermarket.
Mr Morley said he believed the wording of the paragraph was clumsy. What it was trying to achieve was the prospective worker allowing a third party, such as his company, to carry out a background check on behalf of the employer.
"Anybody can find out anything about anybody else with the subject's approval." - NZPA
