Commercial Investigations LLC takes pride in using primary source verification to remain compliant with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Cursory Indicator New York (CI NY) was officially released in 2011 after having been in development since 1999, it was created by our very own Michelle Pyan with the help of the New York State Sheriffs’ Association. Exclusive to Commercial Investigations and our clients, it is comparable to the New York State Office of Court Administration (NYS OCA) search for criminal records.

With a tiered system that indicates when more comprehensive inquiries are necessary, it quickly assesses when additional research is needed and positively identifies subjects by matching at least two of the four main identifiers: name, date of birth, social security number, and address; so, we know when there is a match before any additional costs are incurred. Easy to use and with results available in two to four hours with data updated daily, CI NY is cost-effective with savings of about 65%.

While CI NY and NYS OCA both find and show felony information at the county level, CI NY additionally finds more misdemeanor information from the local, city, town, and village level, arrest information, and variations of names and dates of birth, all with direct online access.

Commercial Investigations LLC knows all of this to be true through conducting many queries on behalf of our clients. CI NY has been able to uncover sex offenders that NYS OCA returned as “no results found”. While performing a cyber investigation on one particular individual, multiple “hits” were found pertaining to a sexual assault case. When this happens, our procedure is to open a developed criminal record, where we locate the court and reach out to obtain the final disposition. When running a search with NYS OCA, no results were found. This forced us to perform more research.

When reaching out to our NYS OCA liaison, to question their “no results found”, we were only provided the control number, incident date, and the court the case was heard at. No charge information was included. The additional information that was provided by NYS OCA matched that of which was found on CI NY. Our CI NY original search caused us to open a Sex Offender Registry search, reporting back that the subject in question had an offense in the second degree over a 14-year-old female. If we had only run the NYS OCA search and did not use CI NY, we would have sent our clients a “no results found” report, which could have led to them hiring a sex offender.

Cases of this severity should not be missed by the NYS OCA. Because we have CI NY and did not rely on the NYS OCA’s lack of results, we were able to perform our due diligence and provide our client with a complete criminal history.

CI NY remains FCRA compliant while continuing to abide by our primary source verification rules. This is because we go to the primary source of the data that is found. With this, potential employees and volunteers are given the deserved time and dignity, especially those with common names, through intensive research and positive identity match before any adverse information is relayed to the subject or client. Commercial Investigations wants to be sure we are 100% certain we have the correct person, while also saving our clients time and money in the process.

Learn more about Cursory Indicator NY here: Cursory Indicator NY