What FCRA covers (and what we don’t).

The Fair Credit Reporting Act regulates consumer reports about individuals — credit history, criminal records, employment screening. It does not regulate verification of business entities. Groundcheck draws this line cleanly.

Entity reports are not FCRA-regulated

A Groundcheck report on a contractor entity (LLC, corporation, partnership, trust) pulls public-record data: secretary-of-state standing, license status, insurance lapses, lien filings, OFAC, and aggregated operational signals. This is business intelligence on a registered entity, not a consumer report on a person. The FCRA does not apply.

That’s why we can return entity standing in under 60 seconds without an adverse-action workflow, dispute window, or pre-employment disclosure.

We don’t run individual background checks

When a request is actually about a person — a driver applying to haul, an individual subcontractor named in your scope of work — that is an FCRA-regulated consumer report, and Groundcheck does not produce it. Our intake classifier detects person-level requests and declines them rather than returning a report the FCRA governs.

Screening a person requires a licensed consumer reporting agency — Checkr, Certn, and others run the written disclosure, signed authorization, adverse-action notices, and dispute resolution the FCRA requires. You engage that CRA directly; Groundcheck is not a consumer reporting agency and does not broker or hand off to one.

What this means for you

You can use Groundcheck entity reports for any business decision — vendor selection, PO approval, deposit risk — without legal exposure. If you need to screen an individual, use a licensed consumer reporting agency directly; Groundcheck will decline that request and point you here.