State Hires Workers Who Fail Background Checks

Here is an amusing story from Colorado; state officials are working hard to help relocate longtime employees who didn’t pass background checks but got hired anyways, evidently by public agencies with low standards.

The state agencies that originally hired them recently folded and the Department of Public Safety was set to absorb them. Evidently, that agency is pickier and requires employees to have clean backgrounds and pass a polygraph test, which as the Denver newspaper reporting the story says, wasn’t the threshold at the other state agencies where the workers were first hired.

So far, Colorado officials are “scrambling” to find permanent jobs for 19 employees, some whom make up to six figures. Some failed the criminal background checks and lie detector tests and others simply refused to take them. Sticking to its high standards of hiring only folks with clean records, the Department of Public Safety won’t add them to the payroll but that doesn’t mean the offenders will lose their cushy taxpayer-funded jobs.

Most of the workers have been relocated to temporary positions in other areas of state government, according to an official quoted in the story. It gets better. The spokeswoman, from the Colorado Department of Personnel and Administration, admits she doesn’t know how long each worker sat at home collecting a state paycheck before the temporary job became available. Their annual salaries range from $104,445 to $35,000.

This incensed at least one Colorado lawmaker who serves as state House Speaker. He points out that no one else in the state is sitting at home collecting a paycheck. “This is exactly why people are so frustrated with government,” he said. That’s a huge understatement.