Home Health & Hospice Week

Industry Notes:

OIG Puts Employee Background Checks Under The Microscope

Popular press isn’t happy that 10 states require no checks on home care workers.

If you’re located in a state that doesn’t require background checks or that doesn’t specify what to do with the information the checks turn up, that may soon change.

In a new report, the HHS Office of Inspec-tor General notes that 10 states do not require background checks of home health workers at all: Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming.

“Of the 10 States that have no requirement for background checks, 4 States (Connecticut, Geor-gia, Hawaii, and West Virginia) reported that they have plans to implement such requirements in the future,” the OIG said in the report, “State Re-quirements for Conducting Background Checks on HHA Employees” (OEI-07-14-00131). “These States have received Nationwide Background Check Program grants from CMS to establish or improve State programs for background checks of long-term-care employees.” The Centers for Medicare & Medi-caid Services has awarded 25 such grants so far, the OIG adds.

Thirty-five of the 41 states that require background checks specify which types of convictions disqualify individuals from home health employment, the OIG says. Only 15 states require HHAs to receive background check results before employment begins. Most other states specify a timeframe in which agencies must receive the results, although “six States (Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington) have no maximum timeframe during which an individual may work without a completed background check,” the report notes.

“Beneficiaries receiving care from HHAs are especially at risk of mistreatment because employees are providing services, usually unsupervised, in beneficiaries’ homes,” the OIG says in the report.

Mainstream newspapers have picked up on the OIG’s warning. No requirement for background checks is a “potential security hole,” says The Washington Times newspaper. Some states that require background checks only mandate statewide searches, which could miss convictions in other jurisdictions, points out Business Week.

Still, “states have gone from being a bit lax in applying criminal background checks to being more and more stringent,” Suzanne Crisp of the Boston College School of Social Work told Busi-ness Week. Crisp co-authored a  on screening home care workers for AARP in 2010.

A Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rep told The Washington Times that the un-ion supports background checks, but that potential workers shouldn’t have to pay for them.

The OIG report is online at http://go.usa.gov/8yW4.

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