Under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), background screening companies (or consumer reporting agencies) are generally prohibited from reporting certain types of derogatory information that the FCRA considers to be too old to be useful, i.e., obsolete. The FCRA also includes a catchall that bars background screening companies from reporting “[a]ny other adverse item of information, other than records of convictions of crimes which antedates the report by more than seven years.” What this means for employers is that the FCRA allows background screening companies to report convictions in background check reports regardless of the age of the conviction, although arrests and other records short of conviction, such as dismissed cases or even charges within a case with a conviction that are older than seven years, will be omitted from the report when it is provided to the employer.
While the FCRA may allow a background screening company to report convictions that are older than seven years, some states do not allow such reporting.
However, on June 9, 2015, Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval signed Senate Bill 409, which “removed the prohibition against disclosing a record of a conviction of a crime which is more than 7 years old in Neveda, meaning that there is no limitation of time for which such a record may be disclosed.”
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