AccuFacts Background Check Errors

If the background check standing between you and a job names AccuFacts Pre-Employment Screening, there is something you need to know before you mail anything: AccuFacts has not operated as an independent consumer reporting agency since 2006. A dispute letter sent to its old address goes nowhere, and it puts your Social Security number in an envelope addressed to a company that no longer exists. This page explains what happened to AccuFacts, who holds a file like yours now, and how the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) lets you force a correction. Our Employment Background Checks page covers the wider picture.

What was AccuFacts Pre-Employment Screening?

Accufacts Pre-Employment Screening, Inc. was a Delaware corporation that sold employment background reports to corporate human-resources departments. It was originally incorporated in New York on October 6, 1994, became a public company through a reverse merger in 1998, and traded over the counter under the ticker APES. Its last headquarters was in Longwood, Florida. In its final full year as an independent company it reported revenue of about $5.3 million, served roughly 900 employer clients across all 50 states, and employed twenty people — only ten of whom did the actual data research behind every report the company sold.

That last number matters. Ten researchers producing multi-state criminal, credit, driving, education, and license reports for nine hundred employers is a concrete capacity problem, and the FCRA's accuracy standard does not bend for small companies. AccuFacts said as much itself in its final annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission: it acknowledged in writing that it "could be held liable to customers and/or to the subjects of background checking reports prepared by Accufacts for inaccurate information or misuse of the information."

What AccuFacts actually reported

AccuFacts was a full-spectrum employment screener, not a criminal-records-only shop. Its documented product line included:

• County, state, and federal criminal and civil record searches
• Credit reports pulled for employment purposes
• Social Security number verification and trace
• Motor vehicle and driving-record histories
• Previous-employer and education verifications
• Professional reference, license, and credential verifications
• Substance and drug testing

In its own filings the company stated plainly that it "is a 'consumer reporting agency' and is therefore subject to the provisions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act." That status is what gives you rights over anything it reported — and over any successor holding that data today.

What happened to the company

AccuFacts nearly sold once before it sold for good. In November 2002 it signed a merger agreement with Kroll Background America at $0.47 per share, amended the deal in February 2003 to extend the deadline, and then watched it collapse. The company stayed independent three more years. On June 7, 2006, it told the SEC that "First Advantage had completed the purchase of Accufacts pursuant to the Agreement and Plan of Merger." Shareholders had approved the deal on May 31, 2006. That was the end of AccuFacts as a reporting company.

Everything since confirms it. The accufacts.com domain is a parked listing offered for sale. "Accufacts" does not appear anywhere in First Advantage's current list of subsidiaries filed with the SEC. It is not on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's 2025 list of consumer reporting companies. There is no active New York corporation under that name. If a document in front of you names AccuFacts in 2026, the document is out of date — not the company you are actually dealing with.

How to contact AccuFacts

You cannot, and you should not try. There is no AccuFacts consumer-dispute department, no working phone line, and no monitored mailing address. Any "AccuFacts dispute address" you find online is a twenty-year-old corporate address, and sending your identity documents there is a risk with no upside. We deliberately do not publish one.

Where a dispute actually goes: First Advantage

First Advantage Corporation is the successor entity, and its Consumer Center is where a dispute over an AccuFacts-branded report should be directed:

• Mailing address: First Advantage Consumer Center, P.O. Box 105292, Atlanta, GA 30348-5292
• Phone: 800-845-6004
• Email: consumer.documents@fadv.com
• Online: the candidate request and dispute forms at fadv.com/candidates/
• Stated timeline: First Advantage says a reinvestigation "will be completed within 30 days from the date we receive your request"
• Free file copy: one free copy per twelve-month period, plus additional free copies if you were denied employment or housing, are unemployed, or suspect identity theft

One honest caveat: First Advantage is the corporate successor, but we cannot promise it still holds or can retrieve a 2006-era AccuFacts file. Ask, in writing, and keep the answer. A written "we have no record" is itself useful evidence about where your information really came from. More detail on that company is on our First Advantage background check errors page.

A name collision to avoid

There is a currently operating engineering consultancy called Accufacts Inc. that works in pipeline safety. It is a completely different business, it is not a consumer reporting agency, and it has nothing to do with employment screening. Do not send it your dispute either.

Your report says AccuFacts. What do you do now?

This is the situation almost no one writes about, so here is the practical sequence. The goal is to find out which company actually assembled the report an employer used against you, because that is the company with the legal duty to fix it.

1. Get the document itself. Before an employer rejects you based on a background report, it must give you a copy of the report and a written summary of your FCRA rights. Ask for both in writing and note the date you asked.
2. Read the fine print for the real reporting agency. Adverse-action notices are often built from stale templates. The name in the letterhead may be a vendor the employer stopped using years ago, while the actual report was pulled from a current screener. Look for a different company name, a P.O. box, or a toll-free number elsewhere on the page.
3. Ask the employer directly which vendor ran the check, and when. Employers know. Put the question in an email so the answer is in writing.
4. Request your file from First Advantage as the successor to AccuFacts, and from any other screener the employer names. Two file requests cost you nothing and settle the question.
5. Dispute in writing with whoever actually holds the file, attaching your proof, and send it in a way that creates a delivery record.
6. Tell the employer a dispute is pending and ask it to hold the decision until the reinvestigation is finished.

If no company will claim the report, that is not a dead end — it is a serious problem for the employer and for whoever generated the notice, and it is worth having a lawyer look at.

Common AccuFacts background check errors we see

Because AccuFacts sold six different categories of data, the error modes in an AccuFacts-era file are unusually broad for a twenty-person firm.

Errors in the underlying records

• Wrong-person criminal matches. County and federal searches keyed to a common name or shared date of birth pull in a stranger's record.
• Bad Social Security number traces. The trace drove the entire search. A flawed trace invents aliases and prior addresses, which then sends the criminal search into counties you never lived in and attaches those results to you.
• Charges reported as convictions, or cases reported with no disposition at all, so a dismissal reads as a live case.
• Sealed and expunged records still surfacing long after a court ordered them cleared.
• Employment-credit errors. AccuFacts pulled credit reports for hiring decisions. Another person's accounts, discharged debts shown as open, and stale collections are a distinct FCRA harm that screener pages usually ignore.
• Employment and education verification failures — wrong employer, wrong dates, wrong ending title, or a degree marked unverified because of a name change or a school-name variant, which an employer reads as resume fraud.
• License and credential errors — a license reported lapsed or nonexistent when it is active in another state or under a former name.
• Driving-record errors — violations belonging to a same-name driver, or convictions reported past the period allowed.
• Drug-testing errors — false positives, specimen mix-ups, and results released without proper medical review officer involvement.

The error created by the company being gone

There is one more failure mode unique to this situation. If an adverse-action notice sends you to a consumer reporting agency that dissolved twenty years ago, you cannot meaningfully exercise the dispute rights the notice is supposed to give you. The right to see your file and the right to a reinvestigation are worth nothing if the address on the notice is dead. That is a problem with the notice and with the process behind it, not with you, and it is worth documenting carefully.

How an AccuFacts background check error hurts you

Employment background reports usually arrive after a conditional offer, which is the worst possible moment for a mistake. One wrong line — a stranger's felony, a degree marked unverified, a credit file that is not yours — and the offer is withdrawn. Most people never learn which specific entry did it. When the reporting agency named on the paperwork no longer exists, the damage compounds: the clock on the employer's decision keeps running while you try to find someone who will even accept your dispute. Lost wages, a lost start date, a gap on your resume you now have to explain, and the stress of being called dishonest for something you did not do are all real consequences the FCRA was written to address.

AccuFacts' track record with regulators

We will not manufacture a record that does not exist. Nothing has been found against AccuFacts, and the explanation is mostly structural: it was a small company that disappeared in 2006.

A search of the Federal Trade Commission's legal library returns no enforcement matter naming AccuFacts. Source. There is no Consumer Financial Protection Bureau enforcement action either, which is unsurprising — the CFPB did not exist until 2011, five years after the company was absorbed. Source. The CFPB's consumer complaint database contains no AccuFacts entry at all; the database opened in 2012. Source. Zero complaints here means the company predates the database, not that it was flawless — and more generally, employment screening companies are badly under-represented in that database compared with the credit bureaus, because most people never learn a screener's name.

The defensible record to look at is the successor's. First Advantage Corporation carries 1,763 complaints in the CFPB database, of which roughly 1,718 fall in the credit-reporting family. The leading issue by a wide margin is "incorrect information on your report," with more than a thousand entries, followed by problems with the company's investigation of an existing dispute. Source. First Advantage also discloses in its most recent annual report that it acquired a company in 2013 that was already subject to multiple FTC consent decrees requiring FCRA compliance and a security program audited every two years. Source.

For what regulators do when a screening company's matching and accuracy procedures fail at scale, the clearest recent example involves a different company entirely: the FCRA accuracy settlement in United States v. RentGrow, Inc. Source. We cite it as an illustration of the standard, not as anything AccuFacts did.

One correction worth publishing, because the mistake circulates: Obabueki v. International Business Machines Corp., the well-known expunged-conviction case from 2001, is sometimes attributed to AccuFacts. It should not be. The consumer reporting agency in that case was ChoicePoint. AccuFacts was not a party.

Your rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act

Accuracy, reinvestigation, and adverse action

A consumer reporting agency must use reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy of what it reports about you (§1681e(b)). When you dispute something, it must conduct a reinvestigation, generally within 30 days, and correct or delete what it cannot verify (§1681i). Public-record information reported for employment purposes must be complete and up to date, or the agency must notify you when it reports it (§1681k). And before an employer takes adverse action based on the report, it must give you a copy of the report and a summary of your rights so you have a real chance to respond (§1681b(b)(3)).

The rights that matter when the agency is defunct

Two more provisions matter when the agency named on your paperwork no longer exists. You have the right to disclosure of everything in your file from any agency that has one (§1681g), and the user of the report — the employer — has its own adverse-action notice duties, including telling you accurately which agency supplied the report (§1681m). A notice that points you at a company dissolved in 2006 does not do that.

How to dispute a background check that names AccuFacts

1. Ask the employer, in writing, for the copy of the report and the summary of rights it is required to provide.
2. Identify every inaccurate entry and gather proof — certified court dispositions, expungement orders, diplomas, license printouts, pay records, identity documents.
3. Send the dispute to First Advantage as the successor entity, not to AccuFacts, enclosing copies and keeping a dated record of what you sent and when.
4. If the employer names a different screener, dispute with that company too. Duplicating the effort is far better than missing the company that actually holds the file.
5. Ask the employer to hold its decision while the reinvestigation runs, and confirm that request by email.
6. If it is not corrected within 30 days, or if the report has already cost you the job, talk to an FCRA attorney.

This information is general and is not legal advice for your specific situation.

Did an inaccurate background check cost you a job?

Employment background reports are consumer reports under the FCRA, and the company that assembles one has to follow strict accuracy rules — including when that company inherited someone else's data through an acquisition. When a report is wrong and it costs you a job, you may be entitled to money damages, and our case review is free.

Bring whatever you have: the adverse-action notice, the report, emails with the employer, and any letters you already sent. Even a dead company's name on a page tells us something about where to look.

How The Kim Law Firm helps

The first job is figuring out who actually reported on you

We are consumer-protection lawyers who handle FCRA cases nationwide. On a file like this, the first job is identification: figuring out which consumer reporting agency actually generated the report, because a twenty-year-old brand name on a notice is a clue, not an answer. From there we pursue the correction and any damages the law allows.

Admitted in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; available to appear pro hac vice in other federal courts.

We help people whose background report is inaccurate — wrong person, expunged or sealed records, outdated entries, mixed files, verifications that were botched. We do not help people trying to hide accurate records. If your report is wrong, you do not pay us unless we win.

When the company named on your report no longer exists

Screening companies close, merge and get absorbed far more often than the reports they produced suggest. The name printed at the top of a background check can belong to a business that stopped operating years ago, and a dispute letter addressed to it is not merely ignored — it puts your Social Security number and date of birth into an envelope going to a company that cannot act on it. The obligation to investigate belongs to whoever holds the file today.

• Social Intelligence — a Santa Barbara social media screening company acquired in 2023, with disputes now running through its successor.
• ClearChecks — whose acquisition by HireRight completed on April 11, 2025, moving its technology and its files into another brand.
• Universal Background Screening — formerly of Scottsdale, Arizona, folded into First Advantage in 2021.
• Orange Tree Employment Screening — a Minnesota screener now part of Accurate Background.
• First Advantage — the surviving company behind several of the names that have disappeared from the market.

Before you send anything, establish which company is actually furnishing the report. The employer that ordered it can tell you, the disclosure you signed usually names the vendor, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes a directory of consumer reporting companies that lists who is still operating. Sending a well-documented dispute to the right successor is worth more than sending five letters to an address that no longer receives mail.

Screened by a different company? We also handle HireRight background check errors, Sterling background check errors, Checkr background check errors, and First Advantage background check errors — and you can start with our overview of the major background check companies.

Frequently asked questions

How do I dispute an AccuFacts background check?

You cannot dispute with AccuFacts, because it stopped existing as a reporting company in 2006. Get the report from the employer, identify the errors, and send a written dispute with documentation to First Advantage, the successor entity — and to any other screener the employer names. Keep copies of everything.

My adverse-action notice says AccuFacts. Is that even legal?

An employer using a report must tell you accurately who supplied it, so you can exercise your rights. Pointing you at a company dissolved two decades ago undermines that. Save the notice, ask the employer in writing which vendor actually ran the check, and keep the response.

Does First Advantage still have my old AccuFacts file?

We do not know, and no one should promise you otherwise. First Advantage is the corporate successor and is the right place to send a request. If it responds that it has no record, that written answer is useful in its own right, because it means the information came from somewhere else.

Can I sue over a background check error if the company is gone?

Possibly. Liability does not evaporate simply because a brand did — it can follow the successor, and separately the employer that used the report has its own duties under the adverse-action rules. Whether a claim exists depends on the facts, which is exactly what a review is for.

What if the mistake already cost me the job?

That is the concrete harm the FCRA is designed to address. Keep the paperwork, write down the dates, and contact us before deadlines start expiring.

Is the case review really free?

Yes. There is no charge, and you pay nothing unless we win.

Where we practice, and what to do if you are somewhere else

The Kim Law Firm is licensed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and that is where we handle matters directly.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act is a federal statute. It applies the same way in every state, it is enforced in federal court, and the deadlines and remedies do not change when you cross a state line. So the answer to "does this apply to me in Ohio" is yes — but the answer to "can you represent me in Ohio" depends on the case and on where it would be filed.

If you are outside Pennsylvania and New Jersey, contact us anyway. Some matters can be handled from here. Some are better sent to a consumer lawyer admitted where you are, and we will tell you that plainly rather than let a deadline run while you wait. Either way you will get an answer, and the review costs nothing.

The one thing that does not wait is the clock. A claim under the Act generally must be brought within two years of the date you discover the violation, and in no event more than five years after the violation occurred. Finding out late does not extend the outside limit.