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Philadelphia Background Check Lawyer

You made it through the interviews. You got the offer, or you thought you were about to. Then the background check came back and the offer went away, and nobody would tell you exactly why.

Often the reason is a mistake. Background screening companies pull records in bulk from courthouse databases and commercial data brokers, and those records get attached to the wrong person, or they show charges that were dismissed, or they report a case that a Pennsylvania court sealed or expunged years ago. The Fair Credit Reporting Act gives you the right to see the report the employer used, dispute what is wrong in it, and recover damages when the screening company will not fix it. Philadelphia adds a second layer of protection that most job applicants have never heard of.

Background Check Errors in Philadelphia

A background check is a consumer report. That single fact is what puts the Fair Credit Reporting Act between you and the company that produced it.

The companies that run these reports are consumer reporting agencies under federal law, which means they carry legal duties: they have to follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy, they have to investigate when you dispute something, and when they report public record information for employment purposes they have to either notify you at the time they report it or maintain strict procedures to make sure the information is complete and up to date.

Philadelphia’s court system is one of the busiest in the country, and its records reflect that. The First Judicial District handles Municipal Court and Common Pleas matters across the city, and cases move between them, get continued, get withdrawn, get nolle prossed, and get expunged. A screening company scraping those dockets on a deadline gets things wrong. When it does, the person who pays for the error is the applicant.

What a Background Check Error Actually Costs You

The loss is rarely abstract. A background check error usually shows up as a specific job you did not get, on a specific date, at a specific wage.

Sometimes it is worse than one job. Screening companies sell to many employers, and the same wrong record follows you from application to application. People come to us after months of interviews that went well and offers that evaporated at the same stage every time, without ever learning what the report said.

There are collateral costs too. Some professional licenses in Pennsylvania require a criminal history check. Some apartments require one. A wrong record can cost you housing and a career at the same time.

The Errors We See Most Often

Someone else’s record. Screening companies match records by name and date of birth, sometimes by name alone. Common names produce mixed files, and a person with no criminal history ends up carrying a stranger’s convictions.

Dismissed charges reported as convictions. An arrest that never resulted in a conviction is not a conviction, but reports routinely blur the two, listing the charge and omitting the disposition.

Expunged and sealed cases that should not appear. Pennsylvania’s Clean Slate law seals many older records automatically, and courts grant expungements every day. Screening companies that bought a stale database keep reporting those cases long after the court sealed them.

Charges reported with the wrong grading. A summary offense reported as a misdemeanor, or a misdemeanor reported as a felony, changes the entire calculation for an employer, and in Philadelphia it can change whether the employer was allowed to look at the record at all.

Records reported more than once. A single case that moved from Municipal Court to Common Pleas can appear as two or three separate offenses, making one incident look like a pattern.

Sex offender registry and watch list false hits. These matches are often made on name alone, and a false hit on that kind of list ends a hiring process immediately.

Philadelphia Limits What an Employer Can Look At

Philadelphia has its own criminal record screening law, the Fair Criminal Record Screening Standards, in Chapter 9-3500 of the Philadelphia Code. City Council amended it in 2025, and the amendments took effect in January 2026. The current rules are stricter than most applicants realize.

An employer generally may not ask about your criminal convictions during the hiring process at all, except where federal or state law requires the inquiry. Where an inquiry is permitted, it may happen only after the employer has made you a conditional offer of employment.

When the employer does look, it is limited in what it may consider:

• Felony convictions may be considered only if they occurred fewer than seven years before the date of the inquiry.
• Misdemeanor convictions may be considered only if they occurred fewer than four years before the date of the inquiry.
• Summary offenses may not be considered at all.
• Convictions for which you were exonerated may not be considered, no matter when they occurred.

If the employer rejects you based on a conviction, it must give you written notice that identifies the specific convictions it relied on, provide you a copy of the criminal history record it used, explain your rights, and describe the kinds of rehabilitation evidence it will accept. You then have ten business days to respond before the decision becomes final.

This matters for a background check case for a practical reason. The ordinance forces the employer to hand you the document you would otherwise never see. Once you have the report in writing, you can tell whether the record on it is even yours.

Pennsylvania Law Requires the Job to Match the Record

Pennsylvania has a statewide rule that applies whether or not you applied in Philadelphia. Under the Criminal History Record Information Act, at 18 Pa.C.S. Section 9125, an employer that receives criminal history information may consider felony and misdemeanor convictions only to the extent they relate to your suitability for the position you applied for. A decade-old conviction with no connection to the job is not a lawful basis for rejecting you.

The same statute requires the employer to notify you in writing if the decision not to hire you was based in whole or in part on criminal history record information.

The Act has teeth. Under 18 Pa.C.S. Section 9183, a person aggrieved by a violation may bring an action for damages and is entitled to actual and real damages of not less than one hundred dollars for each violation, plus reasonable costs of litigation and attorney’s fees. Where the violation is willful, the statute provides for exemplary and punitive damages of not less than one thousand dollars and not more than ten thousand dollars.

Philadelphia Employers Cannot Use Your Credit History

There is a second Philadelphia ordinance that catches people by surprise. Under Section 9-1130 of the Philadelphia Code, part of the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance, an employer may not procure, consider, or otherwise use your credit information in hiring, discharge, promotion, discipline, or other employment decisions.

Credit information is defined broadly. It covers your debt status, your creditworthiness, your payment history, bank balances, bankruptcies, judgments, and collection items. A 2021 amendment removed exemptions that previously applied to law enforcement agencies and financial institutions, though some employer and job specific exemptions remain.

If a Philadelphia employer ran a credit report on you as part of a hiring decision, that is worth a conversation regardless of whether the report was accurate.

What the Screening Company Was Required to Do

Federal law puts obligations on the employer and on the screening company both, and the employer’s obligations come first in time.

Before running the check, the employer must give you a standalone written disclosure saying a consumer report may be obtained for employment purposes, and must get your written authorization. Standalone means what it sounds like. Burying the disclosure inside the job application or an arbitration agreement is a violation on its own.

Before taking adverse action based on the report, the employer must give you a copy of the report and a written summary of your rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and must give you a reasonable window to respond. Employers skip this step constantly. When it is skipped, the first you hear of the report is when the job is already gone.

The screening company has its own duties. It must follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy. It must reinvestigate when you dispute an item. And when it reports public record information likely to have an adverse effect on your employment, it must either tell you it is doing so when it does it, or maintain strict procedures to keep that information complete and up to date.

The Screening Companies We See in Philadelphia Cases

Most background checks in the Philadelphia market are run by a handful of national companies. We have written in detail about how each one handles disputes:

• HireRight
• Sterling
• Checkr
• First Advantage
• Accurate Background
• Pre-Employ
• OpenOnline

If the report that cost you the job came from one of these companies, start with the page for that company. If it came from somewhere else, the process is the same.

How to Dispute a Background Check Error

Get the report. You are entitled to a copy from the screening company. If the employer took adverse action, you were supposed to receive one already. If you did not, request it directly from the company and keep proof of when you asked.

Write the dispute, and put it in writing. Identify the specific item, say precisely what is wrong with it, and say what the correct information is. A phone call leaves no record. A letter or a documented online submission does.

Send the proof. Certified court dockets, expungement orders, and disposition sheets from the First Judicial District carry more weight than an explanation. If the record belongs to someone else, a copy of your identification with your full name and date of birth helps establish the mismatch.

Keep everything. The dates matter. The screening company generally has thirty days to investigate, and the record of what you sent and when you sent it becomes the backbone of a case if the investigation fails.

When the Dispute Fails

Many disputes work. The ones that do not tend to fail the same way: the screening company forwards your dispute to the source that supplied the bad data, the source confirms its own record, and the company reports the item again unchanged.

That is the point at which a dispute becomes a case. A reinvestigation that consists of asking the party that made the error whether it made an error is not always a reasonable one, and the law does not treat the company’s obligation as satisfied simply because it sent a form and got a form back.

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, negligent violations allow you to recover your actual damages, most commonly the wages from the job you did not get, plus attorney’s fees and costs. Willful violations allow you to recover actual damages or statutory damages of one hundred to one thousand dollars, plus punitive damages, plus fees and costs. The clock is generally two years from when you discovered the violation, and no more than five years from the violation itself.

Where a Philadelphia Background Check Case Is Filed

Federal claims under the Fair Credit Reporting Act brought in Philadelphia are filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which sits at the James A. Byrne United States Courthouse at 601 Market Street.

Claims under the Philadelphia ordinance follow a different path. A complaint goes first to the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, and must be filed within three hundred days of the violation. If the Commission dismisses the complaint within a year, you may bring suit in court within two years. The ordinance provides for compensatory damages, liquidated damages capped at five thousand dollars, and attorney’s fees and costs, and allows administrative civil penalties of up to two thousand dollars per violation.

Claims under the Criminal History Record Information Act may be brought in a court of competent jurisdiction, which in practice usually means the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas or the federal court alongside the federal claims.

What This Costs You

Nothing up front. We handle background check cases on a contingency basis, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Criminal History Record Information Act, and the Philadelphia ordinance all shift attorney’s fees to the defendant when a consumer prevails. That fee shifting is deliberate. Congress and City Council both understood that the individual harmed by a bad report is rarely in a position to pay hourly rates to fix it.

Communities We Serve Around Philadelphia

We represent job applicants throughout Philadelphia and the surrounding counties, including Center City, University City, Fishtown, Manayunk, Roxborough, Northeast Philadelphia, South Philadelphia, and Germantown, and across Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware, and Chester Counties, including Upper Darby, Norristown, Media, West Chester, Doylestown, Conshohocken, Ardmore, Bryn Mawr, and Wayne.

If the job was in New Jersey rather than Pennsylvania, see our Newark background check lawyer page, which covers New Jersey law on criminal record screening and expunged records.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to fix a background check error?

A screening company generally has thirty days to complete a reinvestigation after you dispute an item, and sometimes forty five days if you send additional information during the investigation. In practice, straightforward corrections often come back faster. The disputes that drag are the ones where the underlying court record itself is wrong or ambiguous.

Can a Philadelphia employer ask about my criminal record before offering me the job?

Generally no. Under the city’s Fair Criminal Record Screening Standards, an employer may not inquire into convictions during the hiring process except where federal or state law requires it, and where an inquiry is permitted it may happen only after a conditional offer of employment.

The conviction is mine, but it is old. Does that matter?

In Philadelphia it can be decisive. Felony convictions may be considered only if they occurred fewer than seven years before the inquiry, misdemeanors only if fewer than four years, and summary offenses not at all. Separately, Pennsylvania law requires that any conviction the employer considers actually relate to your suitability for the position.

My case was expunged. Why is it still showing up?

Because the screening company is probably reporting from a database snapshot taken before the expungement, and never refreshed it. A court order sealing or expunging a case does not automatically reach every commercial data broker that copied the record. Send the company a copy of the order and dispute the item in writing.

The employer never showed me the report. Is that a problem for them?

It can be. Before taking adverse action based on a consumer report, an employer is required to give you a copy of the report and a written summary of your rights, and a reasonable opportunity to respond. Skipping that step is itself a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, independent of whether the report was accurate.

What if the error is on a credit report rather than a background check?

The same statute governs both, but the process and the companies differ. Our page on credit report errors in Philadelphia covers disputes with the national credit bureaus.

Speak With a Philadelphia Background Check Lawyer

If a background check cost you a job, the first step is getting the report and reading what it actually says. We can help you do that, and tell you whether what happened to you is something the law reaches.

The Kim Law Firm, LLC
1515 Market Street, Suite 1200
Philadelphia, PA 19102-1932

Telephone: (855) 996-6342