When it comes to searching for criminal records every CRA does things a little differently.  Some will tell you to search the entire state, some say each county, others may say both.  But when it comes down to it what is really the best method and what is a clever sales gimmick?  When it comes to county versus statewide the answer is: it depends.

As we’ve covered before every state and sometimes each county within a state can do things a little differently.  Multiple systems, court clerk restrictions, lack of IDs on the public index, etc.  With each court comes unique challenges and as such to recommend only county or only statewide is to ignore the more complicated truth.  Generally speaking the accepted best practice is to run county level searches because the county court is the official court of record.  State repositories are not mandated to maintain the official copy of the record, that is the county court’s responsibility.  However, there are several states across the country that do an excellent job of maintaining all records and all record types from every county.  Many of these are updated by the county in twenty four hours or less.  In these instances it is actually far more economical to run a statewide in place of a county.  You’ll receive far greater coverage at a reasonable cost and go beyond standard best practice.

Unfortunately, not every state is so technologically adept as to maintain a single accurate repository for their records.  However, Eagle Screen maintains a list of the states that can be searched as an accurate single state repository and with the proper settings to your account we can automatically search those areas for you when they appear in your applicant’s history.

Let our years of experience and industry knowledge guide you to the most background screening bang for your buck!