Do you work in a restaurant?  Are you a waiter, waitress, bellhop, counter personnel who serves customers, busser, or service bartender?  Do you work somewhere else where you receive tips? If so, in some circumstances the Fair Labor Standards Act requires that your employer compensate you in certain required ways: Tip Credit: Section 3(m) of

Under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (“USERRA”), an employer may not deny most past or present members of the uniformed service initial employment, reemployment, retention in employment, promotion, or any benefit of employment because of his or her status.  USERRA applies to all employers, regardless of size, and it applies to part-time

Credit reports are comprised of information provided by “furnishers” to the consumer reporting agencies.  Furnishers include banks, creditors, debt collectors, insurers, landlords, doctors, employers, and anyone else who provides information about you to a consumer reporting agency (“CRA”). Furnishers frequently report inaccurate information about consumers to the CRAs.  These types of inaccuracies can include:

Tenant screening companies like CoreLogic, RealPage, TurboTenant, Experian, TransUnion and Equifax provide hundreds, if not thousands, of screening reports to apartment and housing complexes every day.  Sometimes, the tenant screening company will report to the management company that an applicant has been evicted from prior housing.  Of course, that is a big

Uber, Uber Eats, Lyft, Postmates, and Instacart are in the news every day, sometimes for the good, but sometimes for the bad.  One issue that arises daily is new drivers being denied the ability to drive and existing drivers being deactivated because of information in a background report. Uber, Uber Eats, Lyft,

The news media is reporting that Instacart, Pizza Hut, 7-Eleven, Papa John’s, Chipotle, GoPuff, FedEx, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, ByteDance, Netflix, G4S, Securitas, General Motors, and Fidelity are hiring employees during this COVID-19 pandemic.  Many, if not all, of these employers will be running background checks on their new employees. Sometimes, though, these

Employers run millions upon millions of background reports each year on applicants and employees.  When they run the reports, they rely on background reporting companies such as Checkr, Sterling Infosystems, and First Advantage to provide them accurate information in the background report.  Sometimes, the background reporting companies fail. One of the most

Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion are now offering free WEEKLY credit reports during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Before this time, free credit reports were available just one each year.  To obtain your free credit report from each of Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, use the following website: https://annualcreditreport.com/index.action

Is your name John Smith?  Jennifer Johnson?  Peter Williams?  If so, you’ve likely gone through life and met many people with the same name.  Go onto Facebook and search for your name and you see hundreds of people with the same name.  So when an employer requests a background report from a

During this COVID-19 pandemic, many employees are performing their jobs from home instead of from an office or another workplace.  Even though the work is being performed at home, the law has not changed:  employers still must compensate non-exempt employees for all the hours they work, including overtime. Many states have state-specific