Workers accused of theft or damage may soon find themselves on a black list that’s accessible by all potential employers according to a recent BBC article. The National Staff Dismissal Register (NSDR), will allow disgruntled ex-employers to post references online, will go ahead at the end of this month.

The article describes the national register as a development of the Criminal Records Bureau which was set up to provide stringent background checks on those working with society’s most vulnerable, like teachers, careworkers and social workers. Although personal details are deleted after 5 years the attempted theft of property, forgery of documents, money laundering and damaging company property will all get you on to the list.

It’s a tricky business providing a reference for an ex-employee who, simply, wasn’t up to the job. Many companies resort to the old staple of just providing the basics - the start/end dates and just state that they fulfilled their obligations, or in the worst case they provide no reference at all. Never before have records been available in such an open access format and with well established companies like Selfridges, Mothercare and Reed Management registering, there is an obvious demand for a collective database of some sort.

According to Hannah Reed of the Trade Union Congress (TUC),

the register could lead to a candidate not being given a job by an employer who holds nothing more than a personal grudge.

On the other hand who’s to say that a company would want to advertise the fact that they’d been the victim of theft or embezzelment at the hands of their unprofessional, (or even criminal) staff? Surely that’s potentially more damaging to a corporate image than anything an employee could actually do?

In such a setup where ex-employees can be blacklisted even before an official crime, in the legal sense, has taken place, the logical conclusion is that it’s solely the police who should have access to this information. We do live in a time when innocent people become blacklisted, every day, by credit companies for the wrong reasons

From an employers point of view, while they will want to know whether a new recruit has done anything underhand in their previous job, there’s a old fashioned way of finding out, by picking up the phone and calling their old boss to find out. Surely the refusal of a reference is enough to substantiate any sneaking suspisions without resorting to such a public airing of dirty laundry.