Mortgage Broker Steals Identities
by Nick Fishman
Check out this story I recently found in the New York Times: Mortgage Office Manager Charged With Identity Theft and Grand Larceny.
Since these people owned the mortgage company, having them conduct background checks on themselves really wouldn’t have helped, but it is demonstrative to employers of what an employee could do with sensitive data.
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October 19th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Nick-
Since there is no allegation that Mr. Milton had a criminal record at the time that he was hired and/or at any time subsequent up until his recent arrest, how would a background check have helped?
–Gollum
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:26 am
Good question. You don’t know if it would have helped or not. But that wasn’t the point of my post. The point was that if you employ people with access to sensitive data, look what can happen. In this case, the offenders were the owners of the company. Now, one could make the argument that the state should mandate a background check to allow them to qualify as a mortgage broker. However, as you said, if they were never convicted of a crime before this time, it wouldn’t have helped.
October 27th, 2007 at 9:54 am
Nick Fishman-
1) The article does not say that he is an owner of the company.
2) If he is an owner of the company, I am not aware that you have any evidence that the State does not mandate background checks.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:52 am
The point of the post was that you just don’t know unless you conduct a background check. If there is no record that doesn’t mean that this cannot happen. It does suggest that you performed proper due diligence to mitigate the risk of such an event occuring. If you did notice something on a background check that would suggest past aberrant behavior than at least you have all the information before making a hiring decision.