What's A Background Check?

Private investigator background checks are becoming commonplace in nearly every aspect of our lives. As more people are starting to understand the importance of knowing more about people, businesses and organizations before dealing with them, more of them are bringing in private investigators to perform a certain level of background check.

Letting someone know that you're hiring a private investigator to perform a background check may make it feel like you don't trust them. However, these simple checks can save you a lot of grief in the future.

Apart from this, other information that will be useful in performing such checks include:

• The name of the subject of the investigation
• Their current or most recent address
• Their place of employment (if it's a person)
• The angle of the investigation - financial, personal, criminal, employment etc.

With this information in hand, a private investigator can now go about using various resources to find out whatever relevant information they can find.

Background checks carried out by private investigators can be relatively simple, requiring only a computer and an internet connection. However, for other investigations, the resources required can be a lot more.

For example, an investigator may need:

• Access to public records
• Access to private databases
• To talk to people that the subject of the investigation has dealt with in the past
• Access to financial and medical records (with subject's consent) etc.

If you wish to find out if a prospective tenant has a history of not paying bills on time, you can get the information in less than an hour. However, it can take an investigator up to six weeks to get the results of an enhanced criminal background check.

Therefore, the speed with which a background check can be completed will depend on the specifics of the case. Dealing with certain institutions and individuals can take a very long time. For example, a past landlord may take a while to respond to the investigator. Some process e.g. performing criminal background checks cannot be rushed.

For example, a private detective can discover that:

• An individual has an extensive criminal record or a single record of a serious crime
• A prospective tenant has unpaid bills at their previous address
• A company has been hiding a lot of debt using 'creative accounting'
• A prospective employee embellished the details in their resume etc.

At the very least, these kinds of revelations will, and should, compel most people to reassess how they're going to deal with the subject of the investigations.