In all the sensational reporting about identity theft and ID fraud over the last few years, the focus has primarily been on the misuse of the victim's credit cards, the rifling of bank accounts and other financial crimes. However, the charge cards and banking information are not the only proceeds of the crime that the perpetrators value.

The identity itself, with supporting documents, can be infinitely more valuable than a credit card. The credit cards will be reported lost and will be useless minutes after the theft is discovered. Unfortunately, you cannot ?cancel? your identity, even as someone else starts to use it.

The fact is, much identity theft is just a means to an end for a certain kind of swindler. Often, these are people without solid work or residential histories, no credit rating to speak of and so forth. However, armed with your driver's license, Social Security card and a little bit of counterfeiting skill (or someone else's, for a price), someone else can hijack your identity ? and get a new job with it.

Stolen identities are not the only things that surface when companies do criminal records checks, but they should show up quickly. Among the first things that a hiring firm should do, prior to making a job offer to candidates, is to establish that they are just who they claim to be. Ironically, the first basic steps should weed out the worst malefactors, while companies will continue to have trouble with others who appear, on the surface and at first, to be ?stand up? people.

For all of you who make hiring decisions ? small business people, big-company personnel representatives, executive recruiters and employment agencies? the following information is perhaps not earthshakingly new, but reviewing this article may help you cross all your T's and dot all your I's in your upcoming background checks. More importantly, it should remind you how crucially important it is to screen new-hires.

From basic to advanced checks

With the advent of the Internet, there are many inexpensive sources for legally obtaining personal details about a job candidate. However, depending on the extent of the background check required, you may need nothing more high-tech than a telephone to separate the wheat from the chaff.

One of the first things you should do is confirm the contact information you have been given. Verify the applicant's address (MapQuest.com and Google Maps are both great), and for heaven's sake, call the emergency contact(s) and all references. At some point, you should inject into the discussions the physical description of the candidate (if you know it).

A quick call should be made to every company listed in the candidate's employment history. There are laws, both federal and state-level, restricting the kinds of information and comments that can be shared with potential employers. However, you can check the dates of employment, job titles and beginning/ending salaries. Make sure these are in accord with your applicants? claims.

There are a variety of ways, from free to quite costly, to check other information on your candidates. Using the Internet ? with, again, both free and fee-based services ? you can get criminal records from the courts in most U.S. jurisdictions, check Social Security numbers and run credit reports. Depending on what you want to spend, and the amount of access the prospective employee will have to finances or items of value, you may even decide to use a professional investigative service. Be prepared to spend thousands of dollars for an extensive background check of an executive-level candidate.

The reason and rationale

Remember, the point of gathering the data is not just to get a list of facts and figures about Mr. or Ms. Prospect. This is the age of ID theft, so you also want to confirm that the person presenting himself as John Doe is, in fact, John Doe ? and, moreover, the specific John Doe from the specific place and specific college mentioned on his application.

The Internet has given ID thieves the advanced tools and techniques to assume various identities, forge documents, obtain and modify legitimate ones, even create a history and a life record out of nothing but ?cyber dust.? You must, therefore, be prepared to use tools and techniques just as powerful to weed out the frauds and protect your business.

Particularly when hiring office personnel, of any management grade, you run the risk of giving the safe combination to a thief. Even people with no criminal records can be criminals. In fact, they are the better criminals, as they have not yet been caught. The critical importance of safeguarding your company's finances, its inventory and, not least, its reputation, means you must be prepared ? as well as insured, of course.

One policy doesn't fit all

You will have to make some trade-offs in this area, as in all other areas of business planning. You cannot afford a full, private-investigator-led background check on every employee. For instance, you could spend more on checking out, say, the swing shift janitor than he could possibly steal in a year, assuming your company's good security and limited number of door keys.

On the other hand, a new accounting manager with access to the bank accounts and signature authority needs to be checked rather thoroughly. What you need to do is determine what level of background checks makes sense, from a cost and a planning standpoint, for each class or type of position at your firm. Once you have established a sensible budget for the checks, you then need to design a clear, consistent policy for doing them.

Develop a pool of online resources to use as needed. Write down the procedure for using the free research tools, and devise a decision matrix for determining what you will pay to check the background of applicants for various positions (at your fee-based services of choice). Cross train several employees in this procedure so that you will always be able to initiate background checks, regardless of who may be out sick.

A good con artist can swoop down like a hawk out of clear sky, seemingly from out of nowhere, and rob you blind in a matter of nanoseconds ? the unit of time that measures how fast computers? CPUs process instructions. It's billionths of a second, and it is only the slightest of exaggerations to say that the new high-tech crooks operate ?in the dark at the speed of light.?

You need to protect your business against fraud of many kinds. Like the vampire myth, these kinds of ?enemies? also need to be invited in, and they rely on personality, smooth talk, an aura of respectability and sheer nerve.

Interestingly, the term ?confidence men? was coined not to describe your feelings about the crooks ? that you trusted them, had confidence in them ? but rather to describe the attitude the crooks have toward you. They are confident that most people will be fooled. You don't have to be one of them. With the proper procedures in place, and the discipline to use them, you can save your business from being victimized by criminals ? the old ones who've been caught before, and the new ones your new background checks will expose.