Compliance
Background check compliance
Screening law is one federal statute with fifty state overlays on top of it. Most published guidance treats those as fifty separate subjects. They are not. Federal law is the floor everywhere, and the state rules only make sense as departures from it.
So this section is built that way: one federal baseline, then a guide per state covering what actually changes there.
The federal baseline
The Fair Credit Reporting Act
The statute that governs every screening report in the country. Permissible purpose, disclosure and authorization, the seven-year limits and why convictions are not in them, the salary threshold, public record notice, adverse action, and the duties that belong to the employer rather than to us.
Read the article
The state overlay
State guides
Where a state has departed from federal law, and how its courts are actually organised. Written state by state, because the questions that matter are different in each one and a template cannot answer them.
5 guides published
How to read a state guide
Each guide opens with the court structure, not the statutes. That is deliberate. What a screening company can actually obtain in a state depends first on how its courts are organised and whether a statewide repository exists, and almost nobody publishes that. The law section sits on top of it.
Where a state has nothing beyond federal law, the guide says so in one line rather than padding a page to look substantial. A short honest answer is more useful than a long manufactured one, and it is the reason this section has a few long guides instead of fifty thin ones.
Every guide names its sources and carries a review date, because state screening law changes every legislative session and a compliance page that was right last year is worse than no page at all.
This is reference material, not legal advice. It describes what the statutes say as at the review date on each page. It is not a substitute for advice from counsel on your own process. See the terms of use.