In 2018 Pennsylvania passed the country’s first Clean Slate law. A year later it became the first state to seal criminal records automatically for everyone who qualifies, without an application.
At launch the state expected about 2.5 million cases to be sealed in the first month.
Venture capitalists do not rely only on the references a founder provides. They make what they call back-channel references, “the unofficial calls VCs make to people who know a founder but weren’t listed as references.”
Founders check investors the same way. One venture firm suggests founders ask an investor’s past founders: “Would you take this investor’s money again?”
About two-thirds of American renters reportedly pay an application fee when they apply for housing. Tenant background check companies produce reports with extensive personal information. In 2022 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that renters who tried to correct their reports saw the same bad information show up again on future reports.
Good records travel less well. According to industry estimates cited by the bureau, rental payment history appears for only about 2% of renters.
In 1991 the producer Julia Phillips, the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Picture as a producer, for The Sting, published a memoir titled You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. The title plays on the old Hollywood line “You’ll never work in this town again.”
It stayed at number one on the New York Times nonfiction list for thirteen weeks. Hollywood reacted with outrage, and the book is said to have cost her a planned film project.
“This will go on your permanent record” is a familiar threat in American schools. In 2003 the writer Michael Shapiro recalled a teacher who told him his misdeeds “would haunt me for the rest of my life because she was writing them down on my Permanent Record Card.”
As an adult he went looking for it. The card was still on file at Midwood High School in Brooklyn.
Americans who apply for a security clearance fill out Standard Form 86. It asks for a supervisor at each job in the last ten years, and for three people who know you well and who together cover the last seven years.
Investigators do not stop at the names on the form. They interview roommates, neighbors, teachers, classmates, supervisors and coworkers. For Top Secret clearance they generally interview at least two coworkers at each job.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970 governs the background checks that American employers buy from screening companies. Its definition of a consumer report includes information on a person’s “character, general reputation, personal characteristics, or mode of living.” An investigative report gathers it “through personal interviews with neighbors, friends, or associates.”
An employer must get written permission first. Before rejecting someone because of the report, the employer must give the applicant a copy of it.
In 2020 the law professors Ben Grunwald and John Rappaport studied about 98,000 police officers in Florida over 30 years. In an average year, just under 1,100 officers who had been fired from one agency were working for another, about three percent of all officers in the state. They were far more likely than others to be fired again or to draw complaints.
A national index of decertified officers, run by an association of state police standards bodies, lets departments check. In five years the share of police departments using it rose from 23% to 71%. A database of federal officers’ records, launched in 2023, was taken offline after an executive order in January 2025.
In 1986 Congress created the National Practitioner Data Bank. It records malpractice payments, actions against a doctor’s license and restrictions on hospital privileges. A hospital must check it when a doctor applies, and again every two years.
The statute states the reason in its findings: “There is a national need to restrict the ability of incompetent physicians to move from State to State without disclosure or discovery of the physician’s previous damaging or incompetent performance.”
An American professional’s career is displayed publicly as a sequence of positions with dates, visible to their employer and to everyone else. Progression is a matter of public record, and its absence is equally visible.