I did my background check

I paid to get a background check on myself. I had been wanting to do that for a while for peace of mind and what I found is pretty useless information for the most part. It lists a couple of businesses that were never even businesses: things I thought about starting and put up on my Facebook profile at one point, but not the business I ran for years. Maybe I paid for a domain name for them but I never officially started them as businesses. It does not list my main business whatsoever at all. It lists my drivers license and massage therapy license. It lists one record from an arrest in North Carolina in 2014 as a result of being too sick in bed at a motel to pay the bill and no one informed me about their needing payment until the police showed up at the door. It was horribly traumatizing and unfair and my lawyer was thankfully able to throw it out without my ever having to set foot in North Carolina to address it.

Then it said that I am on a possible government watchlist though, which is why I decided I definitely wanted to go through the process of looking at this thing for my peace of mind, especially as there was a problem with my airfare purchase likely due to a credit card error or difficulty authenticating the purchaser (though I have no idea what that means). I was like, I want to find out now, how do I know if I am on some kind of list?

Oh, there is actually another part of the report that concerns me: it does give me peace of mind to know how inaccurate these things are but if someone searches for my background check they are going to see this stuff. I am sure I can prove that it is not me but I don’t know how to get the results removed from background check reports and someone who uses them for hiring or whatever is not going to have a positive opinion of me if they look at my timeline and see 8 potential criminal arrest records for August 23, 2009 and one for September 15th, 2009 in Ohio. They say either, committed: trafficking drugs, or drug abuse: marijuana, and are associated with reference numbers. Then there is one in Akron Municipal Trafficking on September 15th that says whoever this person is was found guilty. I assure you I have only driven through Ohio a number of times, certainly without any drugs, I never had any encounters with police officers in the state, was never arrested, never carried any drugs in Ohio, and was certainly never accused of or found guilty of drug trafficking anywhere!

I am sure someone somewhere could confirm that for me and separate me from these supposed crimes. So now I actually do have something to be somewhat concerned about: how do I get all these ‘potential arrest records’ off my background check? At some point someone may look at them and think these records refer to me and I think I *should* have a right to background check information that actually reflects me. I don’t feel like doing that research and figuring out how to remove it but there must be a process! The report lists email addresses that are not even mine but belong to someone I know and an old email address for a simulation baseball league that I totally forgot I even had. It lists a whole bunch of phone numbers that I don’t recall ever being asociated with. So I know these things have nothing to do with me and though this information being there is something to be concerned about it makes me less scared that this potential government watchlist is actually about me, too. Still it is important to clear your name when you find things like this that have mothing to do with you!

At least the record from North Carolina says ‘likely’ whereas all those others just say ‘possible’. It lists me as being on a possible HHS watchlist, System for Awards Management Exclusion, with HHS. Offense Z1. But it lists the address of the person in question as Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina, and that is definitely not me. “Excluded by the Department of Health and Human Services and all other Federal procurement and nonprocurement programs.” So if I procure services, I guess, if this were me, I could not be paid for them. That is, if this were me.

From brief research, it is unlikely that I am on an airline’s no fly list, and if I am not, there is no reason I should not be able to buy a ticket even if I am on a federal not fly list. They would stop me at the airport. The error I encountered in buying a ticket, though it scares me, probably is not the result of being on a no fly list, but I am going to be really nervous about it anyway until I get a chance to talk to them tomorrow. And dang, I really have to figure out how to get my background report fixed!