Keep Your Fingerprints Off My Ice Cream

This week the Iowa House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow owners of ice cream trucks to conduct background checks on their potential employees.  The bill passed 96-0.

House File 696 is a legislative measure that began with an Iowa-based company that owns and manages a fleet of ice cream trucks in eastern Iowa.  The company wants to run federal background checks on potential employees, but the federal government prohibits fingerprint checks unless the state has included the specific occupation as one in which employers are able to receive the information from a single contact repository.  Under the proposed law, ice cream truck drivers could be equated to certain employees of a homemaker, home-health aide, home care aide, adult day services, or other provider of in-home services; particular employees of a hospice, many employees who provide direct services to consumers under a federal home and community-based services waiver; certain employees of an elder group home; and some employees of an assisted living program  The information received by the business accessing the single contact repository includes information relating to the following: Iowa criminal history, the sex offender registry, the child abuse registry, and the dependent adult abuse.

Fawkes-Lee & Ryan opposes House File 696 because it offers a false sense of security to parents and society.  The practice of relying upon background checks may have an adverse effect.  A background check on a potential employee or current employee should not be a substitute for parents paying attention to their children, and that is what this bill suggests.  It breeds complacency.

Like many laws that have been created in the past 10 to 20 years providing for background checks, it fails to identify first-time abusers.  But there are other reasons why this legislative proposal is terribly flawed.

HF 696 does not require a background check; it only provides that a business owner, vendor, contractor, etc. “may” require an employee to undergo such a process.  An owner/operator does not need to comply with the provisions of the law, and most vendors throughout Iowa will not.  One major flaw in this measure is the question of who pays for this background check.  The language is unclear.  There should be some indication of who pays the costs of the background check, and the burden should be on the hiring party.  Having to pay for a background check on yourself is adding insult to injury, especially if the rate of pay is minimum wage.  Really, how many people are willing to go through this intimidating process for the sake of a temporary, seasonal, minimum wage job?  If this is the best Iowa can do with creating jobs, we’re in bad economic shape.

Another fear that this legislation carries is that the ‘may’ could easily and eventually become a ‘shall’.  At that time it becomes another burdensome and needless regulation of government for small businesses in this state.

But equally important, the bill has nothing to do with government oversight, the committee from which it came.  Already, there are abuses of bills coming from the House Legislative Oversight Committee that should have been dealt with in more appropriate committees.  The practice of moving unrelated bills out of Government Oversight is a terrible precedent in Iowa’s legislative process.  If this practice grows to become another detour around the funnel deadlines, it will be abused heavily by certain special interests that fear taking a bill through the regular stages.

HF 696 is expected to die in the Senate.  We hope it does!

© Copyright 2011  Fawkes-Lee & Ryan.  All rights reserved.

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