For the past year or so, my girlfriend has been using my spare car. She drives around quite a bit for her business and lives in a very crowded area. As a result, she accumulates lots and lots of tickets. She pays for them on time, for the most part. A couple of times she’s been towed, but she’s paid the fine and we picked up the car quickly.
All this time I thought it was not a big deal since they’re not moving violations. Recently I started thinking of background checks. They are used by most corporations before hiring new employees, and the ones performed on senior level management are usually quite thorough. That many parking tickets could imply some sort of personal issues or other negative personality traits.
Would these tickets show up on deep background checks? Is this an issue that I should be concerned about?
Likely not. But there’s a lot of variation between states. A few states don’t release Criminal complaints, but do release some info on Moving violations. Thus, on that particular service your speeding Ticket would show up as a unspecified no-further info “criminal violation”. :rolleyes: I see this nearly every day. It makes me wonder how many dudes have lost a job they were applying for due to this…:eek:
In the past, questions about an applicants’ criminal records specifically told them to exclude parking violations. Since they didn’t care about them at that point, I doubt they care now.
No, no, no. She is not accumulating a lot of tickets, YOU are. She just happens to be taking responsibility for the money that her actions are costing YOU and paying for them.
You are accumulating a lot of parking tickets, your car is occasionally getting towed, and you are financially responsible for all of these charges.
Now if she was getting tickets for moving violations for being stopped by a cop, then those would go against her license and be her responsibility. But parking tickets will go against the owner of the car. This is a very dangerous game of trust to be playing.
How much is the car worth? You want to just think about giving her the car. Sign it over, make sure the title and registration get transferred and then it is all on her.
Oh, and run a credit check on yourself just to be sure that there are no outstanding surprises waiting out there for you. Like tickets she forgot.
Can you expand on this a bit? If she’s been paying them on time and if there are none outstanding, then how does it cost me? I agree that I’m ultimately responsible but I’m not clear how it affects me if everything gets paid on time.
Yes, exactly. There is no connection between her and these tickets. The authorities who issue these parking tickets have no idea who is driving the car. How would they? There is no driver’s license check for a parking ticket.
They are your tickets, Jackknifed Juggernaut. She may be pulling them off the windshield and paying them, but they are your fines to pay. Or perhaps they are coming in the mail and she is paying them. Either way, the liability is all yours.
If she misses paying any, or decides to stop, there is no legal connection between her and the fines owed. You are really deluding yourself by referring to them as “her parking tickets”.
I did background checks in the past and we were only charged with looking for criminal convictions, to the point that if a charge came up and was drop or there was no conviction, we did not report it. These were background checks for security companies.
I do not think that most companies would care too much about parking tickets.
Note also, parking tickets are issued against the car and not against any person. The owner of the car, being the owner of the car, may have to pay those. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I would expect to show up on a background check of any person. Does it really?
No they wouldn’t unless it somehow became a criminal charge. And again we only reported convictions.
ETA: That isn’t to say that there isn’t a way to search for parking/traffic citations but if the security companies I was doing the searches for didn’t care, I don’t imagine most other employers do either.
The real answer, JJ, is a resounding “it depends”. It depends on the corporation, the outsourcer who does the actual check, the method used to check, the level of detail the corporation pays for, and a number of other factors. For example, my company looks at convictions for, among other things, crimes involving “moral turpitude”. We do this because our clients (and federal regs that apply to them) require it. We don’'t look at parking violations, per se, because that has nothing to do with our what we do and is not considered a reflection of character or honesty by our clients. An open bench warrant would certainly show up. All we get back from the outsourcer, by the way, is Pass/Fail. We couldn’t even call you and say “Hey, explain this warrant/conviction in 1966/etc”. You just don’t get the job if you fail the check, end of story.
