[Abe]

Hey Guys,

-DISCLAIMER: Skip to the last paragraph for the actual question – read through completely for all the details.

-I recently read another thread regarding a background check regarding a criminal history, but I have an issue that is not related to criminal history – so I created a new thread for this.

-My concern is the credit history on the background check.

-Few years ago I went through a very tough time with my family, financially. I was a co-signer on a couple of our vehicles and had a bunch of credit cards on my name. Couple of years went by and everything was good, however, In a very short period of time, both vehicles were repossessed due to lack of payment and several of my credit cards went into default and were closed down. In effect, my credit score dropped a couple hundred points in a span of a week. I had applied for a job at a local bank and was rejected (obviously) explaining my credit report was not good.

-4 years later…I have been able to recuperate for the most part. I have settled and paid in full ALL of the defaulted credit cards, phone bills and electric bills – after a couple of years after dropping out of school and working hard to pay it off. I have yet to pay a settlement amount for both repossessed vehicles. My goal is to pay them off as well as soon as I can. Understand that I can simply wait a few years and have them all disappear off of my credit report, but I am still paying everything off because it is the moral and ethical thing to do.

-After some hard work and patience I have been able to open new credit cards on my name and have a few retail credit accounts as well. I was able to lease a new vehicle this time (with a co-signer of course) and my credit is getting better. From a rational standpoint you would see that I went through a financial trauma in 2014 losing everything and now as of 2018 I have new accounts and a vehicle – no late payments – no problems with anything besides my history from 2014.

-I submitted to a background check a week ago and requested my free copy – which I received.

-MY QUESTION – will employers be able to look past this and reason that I have been financially behaving and working hard to pay off my old defaults and closures? Will they still accept me? BTW, I did my internship successfully with them about 18 months ago and now I am coming back as a full-time employee so they require a background check. I don’t know if they evaluate the background history on different standards when coming in as an intern vs. coming in as a full-time employee. My plan is to call HR on Monday and talk with them to see if everything is really cleared.

[Anonymous]

Okay, so I assume a credit report was part of the background check? A lot of background checks do NOT look at credit, which is why I am asking. I think your explanation is perfectly reasonable, and chances are your employer likely will too. I tend to think that personal credit would be more important in the banking industry than the public accounting. Honestly, your employer may not even care, or they may care very much. I would be very surprised though if they simply chose to not bring you back without at least giving an opportunity to explain yourself.

[Recked]

Depending on what your role in the bank job would have been I can see why they would not hire you.
Remember your fraud triangle? A bank would obviously want to keep someone in desperate need as far away from cash as possible.
I am sure lots of CPAs have lots of poor credit scores. I would not worry about it until it becomes an issue. Is your score on the mend now?
Be careful with multiple open accounts. I have and use one credit card and pay it off every month. I suggest you lock all your retail accounts away and never use them.
If you can't pay it off at the end of the month, you can't afford it. Plain and simple.
Get yourself a nice rewards card with no annual fee, like the 1.5% cash back from CapitalOne. Quicksilver I think its called. Those rewards paid for about half my review materials.

[Abe]

Thank you both for replying. I called HR and the woman confirmed that there was nothing of concern which showed up on the report.

I was mainly worried because the background check report copy that I received had an alert on my credit report.

Yeah it makes sense that a bank position would be far more concerned since I have the opportunity with dealing with cash and cash accounts.

Thanks

[Author]

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