Background Checks Don't Equal Racism
If you're hiring somebody to deal with money your company's bringing in, do you maybe want to make sure they aren't a mini-Madoff?

Problem: The government, through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was deeming background checks racism.

The EEOC got another reminder from the court -- this time, a federal court of appeals -- that background checks are a necessary part of doing business.

Todd Lebowitz writes at The Hill:

In EEOC v Freeman, the commission once again relied on the statistical analysis of an industrial psychologist to try to prove that an event planning company discriminated against black male job applicants when it ran credit and criminal background checks. On Feb. 20, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the statistical case presented by the EEOC was "rife with analytical errors," "completely unreliable," and contained a "mind-boggling number of errors and unexplained discrepancies." The Fourth Circuit judges tossed the EEOC's case, just as the Sixth Circuit did in 2014, when the EEOC relied on the same expert whose report was rejected for containing the same types of fatal flaws.

For years, the EEOC has doggedly pursued litigation against companies whose background check procedures it deemed too expansive and discriminatory. The EEOC's strategy relies on the observation that, under certain circumstances, the use of criminal background and credit checks as a pre-hiring screen tends to eliminate minority applicants in disproportionate numbers. The EEOC claims that this violates Title VII.

But wait a minute. Just because your arthritis got better doesn't mean it was because of the Cosmos Bag. Correlation and causation are not the same thing.

Statistical data show that a higher proportion of minorities have criminal records than non-minorities. The NAACP reports that African Americans and Hispanics makeup 58 percent of prisoners, despite making up only a quarter of the general population. There are undoubtedly a variety of factors that influence those numbers, but employers who perform routine background checks on prospective hires have no control over whom police arrest, governments prosecute, or juries convict. If there is injustice in the justice system, employers performing background checks are not the ones to blame.

The reason that criminal background checks reveal more convictions for minorities is because more minorities have been convicted, not because employers who run pre-hire background checks are engaging in unlawful discrimination.

via @overlawyered