UNITED STATES
Wisconsin State Journal
00:00 am 8/15/05
Gary Fields The Wall Street Journal
The green light on the fingerprint scanner glows, indicating it's time to place Kelli Mattingly's right hand on the glass. The procedure is repeated with her left hand. In less than a minute, her prints are ready to be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a criminal- background check.
Mattingly is a would-be volunteer for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, which anticipates no problems in taking her on. Rather, the archdiocese, based in Hyattsville, Md., is one of many private employers trying to comply with a patchwork of new state and federal laws requiring background exams with fingerprint checks.
Once a rarity for job applicants, fingerprints are now required in myriad locales for those seeking positions in a host of fields. Applicants for the janitor's job at Bruggenmeyer Memorial Library in Monterey, Calif., must be screened with prints, as must liquor-store owners in Telluride, Colo., and school-bus drivers throughout Illinois. What's more, insurers are requiring some companies to conduct background checks, including fingerprints, of workers.
The laws requiring fingerprints have spawned a cottage industry of electronic fingerprint capturers, companies that gather prints by computer or those that convert the old-style fingerprint cards to electronic images. Once taken, most of the prints are sent to state authorities, which pass them on to the FBI fingerprint center in Clarksburg, Va. Last year, the FBI performed 9 million checks for private employers, up from 3.5 million in 1992. In fact, half of the FBI's fingerprint checks today are employment-related.