The background check report that landed on your desk in 2024 is not the same report landing on your desk today. The records are different. The rules are different.
If you haven't noticed yet, that's exactly the problem.
2025 wasn't a normal compliance year for background screening. It was the year that Clean Slate went from policy experiment to national movement, Ban the Box expanded into 37 states, and the penalties for getting it wrong jumped to numbers that make finance departments lose sleep.
So here's the question: Is your screening program actually keeping up?
When we polled HR professionals on exactly that question during a recent CIChecked compliance panel, the results painted an interesting picture of where the industry stands. 45% said they were very confident their program kept pace with 2025's changes. Another 35% said somewhat confident.
And 20% said they either weren't confident or were hearing about some of these changes for the first time.
Even the combined 80% who expressed confidence acknowledged that the pace of change is intense. And for the 20% who are just getting up to speed? That's exactly why conversations like this matter.
Nobody's behind - this stuff is genuinely complex, and the fact that people are engaging with it at all puts them ahead of most.
Let's start with what's actually different about the background check reports showing up in your inbox today, because this is where the confusion lives.
Clean Slate laws automatically seal eligible convictions after a waiting period. In New York, that means misdemeanors become eligible for sealing three years after sentencing. Felonies? Eight years. Violent felonies, sex offenses, and non-drug Class A felonies stay permanently on the record - they're never sealed. But everything else is fair game for disappearing.
The word "automatically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. In New York, "automatically" is a misnomer. Each conviction gets evaluated individually based on whether the person completed their supervision, has no pending charges, and hasn't picked up new convictions during the waiting period.
As CIChecked President Michelle Pyan puts it: "You can't look at a report that's a couple of years old and say, oh, this is now an eight-year-old felony, it's not going to show up. There are a lot of factors that go into that, and you'll never know all those factors."
That matters. It means you can't predict which records will disappear from future reports by looking at old ones. The sealing determination happens between parole, law enforcement, the courts, and the Office of Court Administration. Employers are kept out of that equation.
Every state runs its own version of this playbook with different timelines and different rules. Michigan waits two years for misdemeanors and four for felonies. Colorado stretches to seven and ten years, respectively.
Every state defines which crimes qualify differently - a misdemeanor in New York might be a felony somewhere else. Your candidate's record might look completely clean today while carrying convictions that would have appeared two years ago.
The record didn't change. The rules about what you're allowed to see did.
This isn't a flaw in the system. This is how the laws were designed to work - balancing public safety with reintegration for people who've met the criteria. The question isn't whether Clean Slate is a good policy. It's here. It's the policy. The question is whether your screening program accounts for this reality.
When we talk to HR teams about their screening programs, three gaps show up more often than anything else. These are the exact blind spots that turn compliant organizations into cautionary tales.
Does your program cover where your people actually work?
Remote work didn't just change office culture - it blew up the jurisdictional complexity of background screening. Your candidate's home address in New York doesn't tell you much if they're working three days a week from a coffee shop in New Jersey.
If your provider's answer to "how do you determine which jurisdictions you search?" is "just the primary address the applicant gives us," you have a gap. And gaps are where liability hides.
Can you show your work on hiring decisions?
If a candidate or an outside agency asked you to explain a hiring decision tomorrow, could you produce documentation of your process? Not whether your process is legally compliant - that's for your legal counsel. It's about whether you can demonstrate that you followed your own policy.
Are you making the same decisions for similar candidates in similar situations? Documentation isn't about checking a box. It's about being able to prove consistency when someone comes asking questions. And someone will eventually come asking questions.
Is your screening provider keeping you informed, or are you keeping them up to speed?
This is the one that stings. If the compliance changes we've outlined here are news to you, circle back to your vendor and ask why that's the case. Your screening provider shouldn't be a vendor processing background checks. They should be a compliance partner keeping you ahead of what's coming - not leaving you to figure it out from a webinar.
If 2025 was a game-changer, 2026 isn't giving anyone time to catch their breath.
January 1st brought a stack of changes that have already taken effect. California expanded pay transparency requirements, affecting how organizations post job openings and communicate compensation ranges. Illinois now requires candidate notification if AI is used in hiring decisions. Washington, DC, implemented its own Clean Slate law, starting with marijuana-related and decriminalized offenses.
And Philadelphia - already one of the most aggressive municipalities on fair chance hiring - amended its Fair Chance Hiring Law with new adverse action procedures and expanded protections.
February 1st delivered the Colorado AI Act, which requires organizations to document their AI tools, implement risk management frameworks, conduct bias audits, and provide notice to candidates. And the definition of "AI in hiring" is broader than most people think.
Does your ATS automatically rank candidates? Do you use knockout questions that automatically disqualify people? Does your platform use any form of scoring, matching, or automated filtering? All of that potentially falls under this law.
When we polled HR professionals on whether their organization uses AI or automated tools in the hiring process, two-thirds said no. That's a completely reasonable answer - and it also highlights how broad the regulatory definition of "AI" has become compared to how most of us think about it day-to-day.
Your team may not consider an ATS ranking system or automated knockout questions to be "AI," but regulators increasingly do. That gap between everyday understanding and legal definition is exactly what makes this legislation tricky to navigate - and exactly why it's worth a closer look at what tools are actually touching your candidate evaluations.
July 1st brings two more significant shifts. Virginia implements Clean Slate, adding another state to the growing list. And Washington State expands fair chance protections to cover promotions and internal transfers - not just new hires.
Read that again. Your internal screening process for transfers and promotions now falls under fair chance requirements in Washington. If you're rescreening internal moves the same way you did last year, you're already behind.
Looking further out, active Clean Slate bills are moving through New Jersey, Maryland, and Texas. Not all will pass this year, but the trend line is unmistakable. Every year, the list of states sealing records grows longer. Every year, fair chance requirements extend further into the employment lifecycle. Every year, AI regulation gets more specific.
If your screening program was built for 2020, it wasn't built for this.
Compliance is a moving target, and the organizations that treat it like a one-time project are the ones that end up in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Clean Slate is expanding. Fair chance requirements are deepening. AI regulation is spreading. Credit check restrictions are tightening. And the penalties for getting any of it wrong are climbing.
The background check report sitting on your desk right now is fundamentally different from the one you received two years ago. The question is whether your program - your policies, your documentation, your provider relationship, your search methodology - has evolved at the same pace as the regulations governing it.
Because hoping your program is compliant isn't a strategy. And finding out it isn't during an audit or a lawsuit is a very expensive way to learn a lesson that should have been free.
CIChecked offers complimentary program assessments - no strings attached, no obligation, just a straightforward conversation about where your program stands and what questions are worth raising with your team.
Your screening program needs you to start asking better questions - whether that's to us or to whoever's running your background checks right now.
Ready to find out where your program stands? Contact CIChecked at (518) 271-7546 or info@cichecked.com. Or just call us and see if we really do pick up 98% of the time. We dare you.