Ohio Paying Nearly $11 Million to Replace Criminal Background Check System

Written By ESR News Blog Editor Thomas Ahearn

The office of Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine has awarded a $10.8 million contract using money allocated by lawmakers in the state capital budget to replace the state’s “broken” criminal background check system, according to a report from The Columbus Dispatch.

The Columbus Dispatch reports that the new background check system will cost $1.18 million a year to maintain and support and will replace a system operated by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) which uses fingerprint software to match up arrests and convictions.

The Columbus Dispatch also reports that “BCI runs more than 1.3 million background checks a year for public and private employers and provides the criminal-history information used by police officers statewide, as well as the FBI.”

In 2015, both The Columbus Dispatch and WBNS-TV (Channel 10) reported “that the current system erroneously informed some employers that criminals had clean records, while other convictions did not flow into the system for months.”

The company awarded the contract is NEC in Rancho Cordova, California. The complete story is available at http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/07/28/fix-on-way-for-ohios-system-on-criminal-background-checks.html.

As reported by ESR News in May 2015, an audit by Attorney General DeWine found that some Ohio courts were failing to follow a state law requiring them to report criminal convictions to the BCI resulting in an unreliable criminal background check system.

The audit found that dozens of courts failed to report criminal convictions to the BCI. Instead, BCI employees had to check publicly available court websites and contact the clerks of court to find missing convictions to place in the criminal background check system.

ESR News also reported that a study entitled ‘New Facts About the Currency and Accuracy of Criminal Records at State Criminal Record Repositories’ released in June of 2016 by BRB Publications, Inc. revealed inaccuracies in state criminal record repositories.

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