In the world of background screening, conducting sex offender registry searches is an essential component of comprehensive background checks. While crucial, they are a daunting task for Consumer Reporting Agencies (CRAs) because of the amount of manual labor involved in completing them, especially when possible records are found. Because of this, the process has historically come with a high total cost of ownership. Do you know how much it’s been costing your CRA to conduct sex offender registry checks?
The Challenges of Traditional Sex Offender Registry Searches
At the heart of the traditional SOR challenges lies the decentralized nature of sex offender data in the United States - there is no true national sex offender registry in the US. Instead, the data is spread across individual state, territorial, and tribal registries. Automating the process has proven difficult due to the multitude of separate registries, making it a difficult task to maintain a centralized database. Therefore, manual or third-party database-driven searches have become necessary.
That’s where the problems start to add up. Let’s break them down:
Manual Labor and Time-Consuming Processes: Processing sex offender registry searches manually is not only time-consuming but also resource-intensive. CRAs must allocate significant man-hours and financial resources to these tasks, resulting in substantial costs.
Sifting Through False Matches: The manual approach requires exhaustive efforts to sift through numerous results and validate report-relevant entries. The abundance of results, especially for common names like "John Smith," makes it challenging to identify accurate matches. This step is crucial to ensure the accuracy and compliance of the results, and the time and effort required to manually sift through these matches and identify records that pertain to the specific subject can be significant.
County-Level Follow-Ups: Even after identifying potential matches, CRAs often face the arduous task of determining which records are suitable for county-level follow-ups. This is where the "needle in the haystack" problem becomes all too real.
Accumulating Costs: Depending on the volume of individuals requiring sex offender registry checks, the costs can accumulate rapidly. This process necessitates costly manual labor to confirm that a record truly belongs to the subject of the search, and overseeing these operations requires dedicated managerial attention, further adding to the total cost of ownership.
The Hidden Costs of Traditional Searches
The cost of performing sex offender registry searches extends beyond the obvious financial expenditure. It's about the inefficiency inherent in these processes and the opportunity costs associated with them. CRAs might not realize the true extent of these hidden costs until they take a closer look.
Consider the example we mentioned earlier: you have an applicant named John Smith. Entering this name into the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website (NSOPW) results in a staggering 393 matches. Manual labor is required to sift through these results and confirm whether a record actually belongs to the subject of the search. While John Smith is a common name, you can see how the time involved in this process can add up depending on the number of individuals requiring SOR checks – and the cost can become substantial.
Introducing SOR+: A Cost-Efficient Solution
InformData’s new solution, SOR+TM, is the cost-efficient solution CRAs have been waiting for. Sparked by our mission to provide Direct-Source Data® straight from the reporting agency, it was designed to alleviate the burden of traditional sex offender registry searches and reduce the total cost of ownership for CRAs.
SOR+ offers a path to increased cost efficiency and accuracy in sex offender registry checks by leveraging advanced technology to swiftly identify genuine matches. It eliminates the need for time-consuming trial-and-error methods, ensuring speedy and accurate results. And, by automating the matching process, the need for manual labor is removed. This enables your employees to redirect their efforts to more high-value tasks and results in significant savings in labor costs.
By eliminating manual labor, SOR+ also minimizes the risk of errors that may occur during manual searches, thus improving the overall quality and reliability of your reports. All these advantages result in a more simplified and streamlined sex offender registry search, thanks to a centralized solution that eliminates the complexity of managing data from numerous sources.
Contact us to get more details about SOR+ or to learn about our other Direct-Source Data solutions.
Check out our podcast to hear all about SOR+: How Sex Offender Registry+ provides fast, accurate SOR searches with enhanced PII
