by Ajay Trehan, Founder & CEO – AuthBridge

New Delhi: AuthBridge, India’s largest Employee Background Verification firm today unveiled – AuthXtend™ – a continuous screening solution that protects employers against potential risks from current employees, which may risk organization’s reputation and businesses.

While there are static credentials like date-of-birth, employment, identity, which are taken care before an employee is offered a job, there are credentials which are dynamic in nature and which may keep evolving while the employee is on job. It could be related to employees having incurred massive debtsor developed drug dependency or getting involved in a criminal, civil litigation or any other activity. This could risk organization’s reputation and businesses. AuthXtend™- will ensure background verification post-hiring of employees”.

AuthXtend™ monitors employee records in real time and intimate employers or organizations about any internal threats and safety concerns, Mr Ajay Trehan, Founder & CEO – AuthBridge added.

As a usual practice, organizations conduct background checks of their employees only while hiring them. Though a healthy practice, this still leaves scope of improvement on two fronts. First, it captures the credentials and related antecedents of an employee only at that point in time. Second and the less recognised fact is that digitization process of court records and other law enforcement agencies is still on the move and every month lakhs of new negative records are made available.

This simply means periodic screening of candidate’s criminal background against newly available criminal/civil litigation records, allows better verification and reassurance of a healthy workforce.

Elaborating on the impact of digitisation on verification, Mr Ajay Trehan, shares an incident. “One of the company, which is into Education approached us on grounds of suspicion after one of their drivers went missing suddenly. Upon conducting a search in our databases, we found out that the driver had a murder charge against him. Further enquires with the authorities and his family revealed that he was taken in custody by the police. The driver was on job for 5 years, but an interesting realization was that his criminal history would have gone unnoticed even during verification while hiring, in the absence of access to these records that have only recently been made available in the public domain,” he points out.

“Think of the risk level involved for all stakeholders (students) of the company who might’ve come in touch with this driver while he was still employed! The police record against the driver could have come to notice earlier with a periodic screening solution like AuthXtend™ in place that yields regular insights into employee behaviour based on the latest data available,” explains Mr. Trehan.

The increasing instances of workplace harassment, embezzlement and frauds also make a case for continuous background verification ensuring current employees are indeed assets and not liabilities.

AuthXtend™ is one-of-its-kind solution in India that fills these gaps and takes the regular background verification to another level by periodically assessing the critical workforce against latest available data sources for effective risk mitigation.

At the time when talent is at the core of any growth strategy worldwide and every day, lakhs of employees around the world, across industries are being promoted, transferred, accessing precious data, dealing with trade secrets, handling sensitive information, facing an organisation’s customers, bringing in vendors and clients; a flapping of wings: a change of intent and the butterfly effect can cause a tornado striking hard at an organisation’s finances, reputation and culture. Imagine the damage in case of key decision makers, mostly hired internally – more than 50% of the times – and least likely to be re-verified.

Think about it: Can we be certain that a law-abiding person with no criminal record will never commit a crime? AuthXtend™ takes these possibilities into consideration to offer smart checks, especially on dynamic parameters – education, criminal record, drug abuse, credit default etc. Acting as a portfolio manager, AuthXtend™ screens employees annually, quarterly or a time period best suited to a business and the levels of risks associated with it.