Reliable and timely court research is a critical component of any services provided to CRAs in the background screening industry. A pre-hire background check often requires multiple steps – including an address history trace, a national criminal file (“nat-crim”) search, and validation of the candidate’s personally identifiable information (PII). This produces pointers to where official court research and record retrieval at the county level should be conducted.
This court record search can span multiple counties and courts based on where the applicant has lived, and any historical pointer public criminal records found in the nat-crim search. Research is performed across disparate county court systems, and records must be confirmed and matched to the PII provided and subsequently adjudicated to determine if any records can be used based on the CRAs instructions.
Court data can be accessed in several different ways: public online court systems, going on site and contacting the court directly for case documents, or some combination of online and on-site research. Humans manually searching records online is time consuming and may be prone to errors. “Court runners” going on site to use public access terminals or requesting case copies is costly and even more cumbersome. This often lengthy and expensive process can be significantly streamlined through smart automated retrieval processes.
Robotic Processing Automation (RPA) technology, or software robotics, is a benefit for the background screening industry because it automates the time-consuming processes of data retrieval, filtering, cleansing, matching, adjudication, and result transmission.
The court research process involves three distinct phases: gathering the most reliable and up-to-date court data from the primary source, cleansing/filtering the data based on CRA instruction, and performing requested records validation. All stages of this process can be significantly improved by RPA technology. Through automation, data is retrieved in real-time directly from the official online court source at the time of the order – a key step in improving quality and reducing turnaround time. Humans simply cannot do this as quickly, affordably, and reliably as RPA technology.
Once the data is retrieved, it must be cleansed and filtered – a process usually done by humans reviewing the data themselves to remove noise (unrequested records), match records to the applicant based on available PII, and validate accuracy meeting the CRA’s request. RPA can cleanse, filter, and match records to specific rules provided by CRAs. It also eliminates the need for manual review and input of information and automates human keystrokes in the workflow as data is retrieved, validated, and moved through the process. This further improves turnaround time and quality of the information passed onto the CRA.
Automation can make a significant impact on the bottom line, reducing turnaround time and unnecessary costs while providing an even higher degree of confidence in the reliability of the requested information. The way it is executed can vary significantly depending on client needs, providing a flexible and customized system for accessing the best possible data.
Thanks to automation, CRAs can also choose to receive court data through a custom filter and specify the way they want the data to be processed. A traditional court runner will often return a result that is limited in scope. Legacy “scraper tools'' typically return more records than needed and require clean up by human staff. RPA and more sophisticated robotics, on the other hand, can filter results intelligently based on a CRAs needs to reduce noise, avoid mistakes, and save adjudication time.
Automation is driving more reliable, efficient, and cost-effective operations, thanks to real-time data retrieved straight from the authorized court source. These results can also be custom filtered so CRAs get exactly the results they need. Custom filtering cuts down significantly on the amount of work the CRA or client must do.
Court research workflows can benefit from near real-time records straight from the court-authorized source, and automation can make all the difference. Find out how they can help your business today.
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