Sunday, September 21, 2008
News
ChoicePoint’s bittersweet awards
Alpharetta-based ChoicePoint finalized its approximately $4 billion sale last week...just after being tapped for several humanitarian awards.
A survivor of Hurricane Katrina cries on the one year anniversary of the storm in Waveland, Mississippi in 2006.By Phillip R. Barea
Alpharetta-based ChoicePoint finalized its approximately $4 billion sale last week to multinational corporation Reed Elsevier as well as its merger with Reed Elsevier subsidiary LexisNexis just after being tapped for several humanitarian awards.
After Hurricane Katrina, ChoicePoint helped provide identity verification for the Red Cross to make sure individuals applying for assistance were who they said they were and that they actually resided in the affected disaster area.
“This tool was implemented in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina to help Red Cross call center personnel verify identities and confirm the address of individuals,” says Ansley Jones-Colby, vice president of ChoicePoint Cares.
The company, which provides identity verification as well as pre-employment and property insurance applicant background checks to businesses, donated approximately $600,000 in services to the American Red Cross and other relief agencies to screen more than 30,000 volunteers and employees during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
That effort was only one part of a full-speed-ahead campaign to put some unpleasantness behind the company. In 2000, ChoicePoint acquired Database Technologies, which was implicated in the famous “false felons” voter scandal in the presidential race in Florida that year. The state had hired the company to ferret out felons from the voter rolls. Database Technologies employees warned elections officials that the state’s failure to use Social Security numbers in many of its records would likely result in the wrong people being barred from voting.
“From the beginning, Database Technologies raised serious concerns that non-felons could be misidentified,” the Washington Post reported on May 31, 2001. But the state moved ahead with its plan, and the company endured the scrutiny and backlash that came with the results.
Now it’s a new day for ChoicePoint.
In early September, the company earned the top rating of 100 percent in the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), an annual survey administered by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, for the sixth year in a row. The Corporate Equality Index rates employers on a scale from 0 to 100 percent on their treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) employees, consumers and investors.
Ten other companies based in Georgia joined ChoicePoint in gaining the recognition, including Alston & Bird LLP, The Coca-Cola Company, Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc., Cox Enterprises Inc., ING North America Insurance Corp., Newell Rubbermaid Inc., Powell Goldstein LLP, SunTrust Banks, Troutman Sanders LLP and United Parcel Service Inc.
Additionally, through its work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, ChoicePoint technology has been directly responsible for the return of 100 missing children since 2000.
And in 2007, the American Red Cross awarded the company its “Circle of Humanitarians” award, in recognition of ChoicePoint’s donation of technology and data processing services in support of relief efforts after hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
“We provided free background screening products to the North Fulton Housing Initiative to screen persons who needed transitional housing, as well as those people who opened their doors to the evacuees,” says Jones-Colby.
The idea was to prevent fraud and abuse of services by victims. The Hurricane Katrina Fraud Task Force reported nearly 150 arrests in 2005 for disaster-related federal crimes.
But ChoicePoint officials say they weren’t just checking up on evacuees. The company also used its Volunteer Select Plus service to conduct criminal background checks on volunteers to make sure they didn’t pose a threat to disaster victims.
During the aftermath of the 2005 storms, ChoicePoint donated three of its call centers and their staffs to help process donations for disaster relief. The company also went so far as to design new software specifically for that purpose. One report says that those efforts helped raise $100,000 in one hour.
The American Red Cross was one of the largest beneficiaries of ChoicePoint’s work during the relief efforts. As one of its corporate partners, ChoicePoint provided $1 million worth of identity verification products to prevent fraud and manage personnel.
“ChoicePoint is a better company today because of this experience,” says Jones-Colby. “We learned how quickly, efficiently and willingly our associates could mobilize their efforts and our technologies to help people in need.” SP