Employee pre-screening, ongoing screening & why it is important Loop Cayman Islands

Black Immigrant Daily News

Some Cayman companies must record information on their files about their clients to comply with national and international obligations associated with our anti-money laundering regime. This includes clients’ passports (to identify them), utility bills (to verify their address) and evidence of source of wealth (to ensure that client funds are not connected to terrorist financing, money laundering or other criminal activities). What is not talked about much, however, is how much effort these companies make to know their employees prior to hiring and on an ongoing basis.

Why checks should be done

For companies that are not doing pre-screening exercises for potential employees and are therefore not completing a detailed risk assessment to understand risks posed by a specific employee, they are leaving themselves open to unknown threats. Some these dangers (and checks that should be done) include the following:

Danger: Liability exposure for the company

By way of illustration, let’s say you’re running a hospital. You may want to ensure that the doctors performing procedures are properly qualified before you hire them. Otherwise, a patient could file a lawsuit claiming negligence and that an unqualified person performed procedures on them. This could result in hefty damages against the hospital.

In this case, examples of checks that you can do are direct verification with licensing bodies locally and overseas to ascertain that the person is properly licensed (and if revoked, reasons for revocation), direct verification with universities that the applicant claims to have attended (some applicants create fake certificates online), searches of court databases in the country where the applicant is originating and where they spent parts of their career (court searches are available online in Cayman for example and case lists are published by the courts weekly), name checks (including any aliases), obtain police clearance certificates (if available) from the applicant’s country of origin and locally.

(As a useful tool, guidance to obtain overseas criminal records for potential employees can be located on the following link: https://tinyurl.com/fwrjb9ns )

Danger: Security risk

If an adequate risk assessment is not made and a bad actor slips through and gets hired, this could pose a security risk for your company, depending on the seniority of the hire. For example, imagine a senior hire being given important passwords or access to restricted areas or confidential information. That person then shares the passwords with outsiders or allows unauthorized persons to enter restricted areas or breaches confidentiality. Any of these scenarios may result in employees or clients being put in harm’s way or the competition obtaining business secrets that can be used to gain an edge or destroy your business or a client.

Danger: Loss of reputation

The occurrence of any of the foregoing can lead to significant embarrassment for your corporation and a loss of trust and confidence in you and your business. Once your reputation is shot, it is hard to regain it or build back clients.

Screening should be ongoing

Once you complete this pre-screening and decide to hire someone, it is important that ongoing screening be completed.

British Standard 785 of the Centre for Protection of the National Infrastructure in the UK, for example, says that “The Standard sets the minimum screening period at three years, with no unverified gaps greater than 31 days” and “full screening should be completed no later than 12 weeks after employment has commenced (for checks totaling five years), or 16 weeks (where the checks are for longer than 5 years).”

Such ongoing screening may include monitoring of employee’s comments on social media (sharing non-public information publicly or negative remarks about the business or clients), drug testing (depending on the nature of the job) and checking criminal records for any new crimes committed.

Each company to decide its own approach

Notwithstanding the suggestions for pre-screening and ongoing screening, it is ultimately up to the company to decide if they will do the exercises and, if they do, how often and how they will be completed.

In addition, each company should disclose to potential and existing employees that such screening may be done. And regardless of the approach, the company must ensure that it remains in compliance with the Data Protection Act and the constitution when managing employee personal data during the screening process.

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