Pre-employment background investigations

updates are essential to sound business practices. UCMJ Investigations can help you protect your businesses’ reputation and profits by conducting pre and post-employment investigations for you. Through our work with a host of government agencies (NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, CBP, Coast Guard, Homeland Security, and many others) we have honed our skills and instincts. We are experienced and we know what we are doing.

Case Study
A local business owner found what he thought was an excellent candidate for his office manager position. The office manager has direct access to incoming cash and deposits and based on the candidate’s sterling resume, the owner was convinced that she was the right person for the job. After he found unusual expenses (bicycles charged to his credit card and delivered to his shop) and other anomalies, he hired us to investigate and clarify the damage he believed stemmed from this candidate’s business practices in her position as office manager. Too little too late, he had already lost over $160,000. When we looked into her background we found eleven outstanding warrants in another state for fraud.

We’re not in the fortune-telling business, but it’s safe to say that if our client had done his due diligence and hired us to conduct a pre-employment background check… he probably wouldn’t have hired this candidate. Sometime later we received notice that the business owner had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, finding that the losses were too great to recover from.

Now more than ever, business owners must scrutinize every expenditure. You cannot afford to think of professional pre-employment investigations as luxuries. They are necessities. We have worked on cases where conducting a background investigation would have saved companies $300,000 to $400,000 in addition to the immeasurable costs of lost customer confidence.

Our background investigations are very detailed and are designed to uncover the most basic details of someone’s life. We give you the information you need to make fundamental business decisions about who to trust in your entry-level, mid-level and senior-level positions.

What about post-employment investigations? Think of it this way: When you buy milk do you use it without thinking until it’s gone? Not likely. Most of us pay attention to the “sell by” and expiration dates, and when we’ve had the milk a while we take a quick sniff before pouring it onto our cereal. Why? Because we understand that something that is good today may not be good next week. New employees don’t know your internal system, old employees do. New employees are a threat to you; old employees are a bigger threat.

We can uncover things that employees have become involved in since they started working for your company. Child pornography, drugs, internal thefts, ethics violations, fraud and abuse of authority; any of these could seriously harm your business reputation or cost you serious money.

Case study
An employer who was smart enough to conduct pre-employment background checks missed the boat on a post-employment investigation. He didn’t realize that when he hired new employees they didn’t know anything about his business or any of the vulnerabilities that exist. Some who started out as sterling employees later became tempted and knowledgeable enough to perpetrate internal fraud. He failed to check up on them, despite numerous red flags and ended up losing over $140,000 to an employee who had worked for him for almost eleven years. Result: a valuable lesson learned, but a little too late.

UCMJ Investigations recommends a thorough check on senior staff at least once every 5 years as a prudent preventative measure, especially for those people who are “C” level employees (CEO, CFO, COO). Any employee that has access to account information or customer information MUST be investigated.

We have a vast background in conducting “people” investigations and can help you protect your business.

Don’t learn a valuable lesson a little too late. Call UCMJ Investigations at 501-515-2868 for more information on pre and post-employment investigations.

** If you have a case and are not sure if an investigator can help or contribute to your case, contact us for a free review. **