Employers, more than ever before, need to protect themselves against accidents and crimes committed by their employees. With negligent hiring, lawsuits, training costs, workplace violence and theft on the rise, pre-employment screening as well as taking the correct pre-employment screening steps are no longer an option, but rather a necessity for businesses.

When conducting a thorough pre-employment background check, it is always important to check maiden names as well as nicknames or aliases.

A YMCA in Maysville, Kentucky learned this after their aquatics director and swim team coach was arrested on charges of theft by unlawful taking of over $300 and tampering with physical evidence. Diana Mokler was sentenced on June 13th of this year for allegedly embezzling money from the Maysville-Mason County Recreation Park pool. She was sentenced to four years in prison on each of the two charges against her.

While she was in charge, she failed to make deposits into the correct accounts and kept those funds for herself.

After Mokler’s arrest, an investigation revealed that she was also convicted in Washington State for similar crimes. She embezzled $250,000 from a law firm where she was employed, for which she was sentenced to 50 months in jail.

The YMCA claimed they ran a background check on Mokler when she was first hired, but the company who performed the check, a major payroll processor & background screener, did not uncover the previous charges. We were able to find her criminal record based on an alias, Diana Merrill.

This is a good example of why due diligence is important; following up on possible maiden names or other names a person has gone by may reveal a criminal history that may otherwise have gone unreported.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.