Here’s more valuable information from the National Association of Professional Background Screeners about the limitations of using fingerprints to do a criminal background check. “For a record to be located and housed with the FBI’s Interstate Identification System, it must have a fingerprint associated with it. Unfortunately, fingerprints aren’t associated with all criminal records indexed at county or state repositories. Common identifiers are name and date-of-birth, and more frequently in the last few decades SSNs have been listed. To complicate matters, while all states currently participate in submitting records to the [FBI], it must be noted that criminal record reporting is extremely irregular across counties and states. Even further, not all state criminal records or fingerprints meet the FBI’s standards for inclusion in the FBI’s Interstate Identification System, and not all state records are submitted to the FBI.”
The foregoing quotation should make it clear that relying on a fingerprint check is not a foolproof way to do a criminal background check on candidates for employment.