Making a hiring decision? Use an FCRA workflow.
FCRA workflows are built primarily for tenant screening and hiring decisions. If a result will help decide whether to hire someone, the check has to run as an FCRA-regulated consumer report, with a permissible purpose, consent, accuracy controls and a dispute path for the person. Our standard search and API are not a consumer report. FCRA workflows run through FCRA Partner Access, for background check companies and screening platforms under a written FCRA agreement.
FCRA pricing is quoted per partner, so contact us for pricing.
Why care marketplaces need caregiver screening
This is not hypothetical. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal reported that a major care marketplace put the onus of background checks on families — with sometimes tragic outcomes.
The investigation found that over six years, caregivers with prior police records who were listed on the platform went on to be accused of crimes — including abuse and cases in which children died — and that a “background checked” badge often meant only a one-time preliminary database screen, with no interview, references or fingerprinting behind it. The company pulled tens of thousands of listings in the days before the report ran. When something goes wrong, the questions a platform faces are always the same: what did you check, and when? A registry screen is a concrete, documentable answer.
What the law requires of care platforms and caregivers
Most screening law is written for care providers, not for the marketplaces that connect them with families. Child care programs that receive federal CCDF funds must run comprehensive checks that include the sex offender registry of the current state and of every state lived in during the past five years, under the federal CCDF rules (45 CFR part 98). Florida’s Level 2 screening for healthcare workers reaches the same five-year, multi-state registry history (Fla. Stat. § 435.04). A caregiver working through a platform may fall under rules like these depending on the care they provide and where.
Federal home-care rules are thinner than they look. Medicare’s home health conditions of participation contain no aide-screening requirement, and the CMS National Background Check Program — a voluntary grant to states — ended in 2024. For a marketplace, then, screening is mostly a duty-of-care and liability decision, and the design is yours.
One rule does apply whatever the category: if a result decides whether a caregiver can work on your platform, treat it as an FCRA-covered decision and run it through an FCRA-regulated workflow, with consent, accuracy controls and a dispute path.
How care platforms integrate caregiver screening by API
One endpoint, one schema — screen at the moments that matter and sweep the base you already have.
- At signup. Screen a new caregiver against all 58 US registries before a profile can go live or message a family.
- At booking. Re-check at the point a family actually hires, when the stakes are highest.
- In bulk. Batch-screen your existing caregiver base in one pass — same scored, source-cited schema, billed per row.
- Criminal records too. Add county, state and federal records on the same key where the role warrants.
- Ongoing. Re-screen or monitor so a caregiver added to a registry later does not stay invisible on your platform.
Details on the home-care, home-health and childcare solutions, and the Sex Offender Search API. Serving families directly? See the nanny and caregiver background-check guides.
Designing the caregiver screening flow: matching, review and disputes
The expensive mistakes in screening have been about accuracy. Regulators have penalized name-only matching against registries, and a vendor for a major home-sharing platform was sued over a mislabeled offense (Taylor v. Inflection). Build the flow so a false match never becomes a decision.
Match on verified identity
Send the legal name and date of birth from your identity-verification step, not a profile display name.
Act on match strength, not presence
Each candidate comes back scored with the reason it matched. Weak matches on common names are usually someone else.
Put a person in the loop
A trust-and-safety reviewer confirms a strong match against the photo and the official record link before anything happens to the account.
Give caregivers a way to dispute
Engagement decisions run through an FCRA workflow, which includes notice and a dispute path for the person screened.
What a registry result returns for a caregiver
A search returns de-duplicated candidates across the 58 US registries. For each one: name and aliases, offense, registration dates, county and state, registration status, a photo where the registry publishes one, a match score with the reason it matched, and a link to the official registry entry. The response also counts the registries queried and the registries that answered, so your system can tell a clean result from a partial one and re-run it rather than treating silence as clear.
Store the response, its timestamp and your reviewer’s decision with the caregiver’s record. When a family, a journalist or an insurer asks what you checked and when, that log is the answer. The developer walkthrough shows the request and response end to end.
The business case for caregiver screening on a care platform
A control you can point to
“We screen every caregiver against the sex offender registries” is a statement families understand and press and regulators respect — and it is defensible only if you actually run the check.
Screen every caregiver, not some
Per-check pricing lets you apply the same screen across your whole base and every new signup, instead of a badge that means less than families assume.
Reputational risk control
A single incident tied to a caregiver who “shouldn’t have been on the platform” is an existential brand event and a negligence magnet. Screening is a proactive, documentable duty-of-care step.
Trust as conversion
Safety is the product for a care marketplace. Registry screening is a trust story you can market to the families deciding whether to book through you at all.
Caregiver screening for care platforms: FAQ
Why do care marketplaces screen caregivers against the registry?
User safety and platform liability. A 2019 Wall Street Journal investigation reported that a major care marketplace put the onus of background checks on families, and that caregivers with prior police records who were listed on it went on to be accused of crimes. When a family is trusting your platform to match them with someone who will be alone with a child or an elderly parent, a registry check is a concrete trust-and-safety control you can point to.
How does a platform integrate it?
One API call. POST a name (and any date of birth, age or location you hold) to /v1/search and get back scored, de-duplicated records across all 58 US registries, each cited to the official source. Screen a caregiver at signup, again at the point of booking, or batch-screen an existing roster — the same schema every time.
Can it scale to a large caregiver base?
Yes. A batch endpoint takes many searches in one request and bills per row, and an async endpoint handles high volume. Per-call pricing ($0.15, lower at volume) is public, so the unit cost stays predictable as your marketplace grows.
Is this a consumer report?
Not on the standard API: standard results are not a consumer report; FCRA-regulated use runs through FCRA Partner Access. It is a registry-and-records search surface you integrate as one trust-and-safety signal; adjudication and any FCRA-covered process remain the platform’s responsibility.
Standard OffenderSearch results are not a consumer report. Reporting references are general information, not legal advice.
Add caregiver screening to your platform this week
An instant key, 25 free calls, one endpoint across all 58 US registries — plus criminal records on the same key.