Screening For Safety

Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ashley Roe

An Atlanta-based technology risk assessment company is helping several of the country's Class I railroad companies effectively screen their contractor employees without having to sacrifice manpower.

e-VERIFILE, founded in 1999, is a developer of Web-powered risk assessment programs designed to help human resource managers, recruiters, corporate security officers and other users involved in employment decision-making screen job applicants prior to hire. Three years ago, the company identified a need to tailor its program to suit users in the transportation industry, namely, the railroad industry.

The company spoke with representatives from Union Pacific Railroad, the largest railroad in the United States, who said that nearly two-thirds of the workforce on Union Pacific property were contractors. “At that time, there was a lot of government scrutiny coming down on the different modes of transportation to ensure that all contractor employees passed background screenings,” says Devon Wijesinghe, e-VERIFILE chief strategy officer.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, railroad companies began developing new security plans and procedures to address the new terrorist threat and to train staff - the majority of whom are contractors with little railroad experience - to handle security situations appropriately. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, railroads move about 1.7 to 1.8 million carloads of hazardous materials each year, with roughly 105,000 of the carloads consisting of Toxic Inhalation Hazard (TIH) materials such as chlorine and anhydrous ammonia. According to the Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation, these materials could potentially cause significant numbers of fatalities and injuries if intentionally released in an urban environment. Moreover, Wijesinghe says that roughly 90 percent of the U.S. military's artillery resources move up and down freight rail lines, which cover about 170,000 route miles of track throughout the United States.

Class I railroads were looking to develop more robust and efficient background screening and safety training procedures for contractors to meet recommendations made by the government. “But the railroads indicated that they did not have the resources to manage the background investigations and administer the safety testing to employees of contracting companies,” Wijesinghe says. e-VERIFILE responded to the need by developing e-RAILSAFE, a Web-based program designed specifically for railroad contractors that facilitates safety orientation, background screening, credentialing and tracking of their employees.

To use the service, railroad companies inform their contractors that in order to work on railroad property, they must be e-RAILSAFE certified. e-VERIFILE first conducts a due-diligence process on the contracting company to verify that the company is legitimate. To begin the process of certification, contractor companies then upload the names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and photographs of their employees into the e-RAILSAFE system by creating a profile at erailsafe.com.

e-VERIFILE conducts a background check on each of the contractor employees using the information provided and comparing it against criminal history records and government-provided watch lists. When the checks are complete, each contractor employee is assigned a grade. Disqualifying contractor employee accounts are flagged based on defined criteria. For example, contractor employees cannot have had a felony conviction in the past seven years, and they cannot have been released out of prison in the last five years. Certain crimes such as homicide, sedition and treason are also disqualifying, according to Steve Hanes, Norfolk Southern Railway police director, an e-RAILSAFE user since May 2005. “We look for a criminal history that presents a lifestyle of crime,” Hanes says. “We are not doing anti-terrorism checks; we are doing crime-prevention activity. We are concerned if these employees would steal our freight, so these background checks are done in order to determine risks.”

Background screening information is then released back to the contractor company, who reviews qualified and disqualified employee profiles. When considering disqualified employees, the contractor company decides whether to continue with the hiring process and reassign the employee to another position or to deny their application. Applicants who are disqualified after not meeting the hiring criteria are sent a letter of denial and given an opportunity to appeal the decision.

“Those people who are rejected are notified that they have been rejected and given the reason why, and they have a right to appeal the decision within a certain timeframe,” Hanes says.

Applicants also take necessary rail security awareness and online orientation courses developed by the railroads and delivered online by e-RAILSAFE. The courses cover subjects such as the proper handling of suspicious items found on or near a railcar, how to report suspicious people or activity, information security and the basic rules and procedures of working on the railway.

When qualifying contractor employees have completed the courses and passed the tests and background checks, e-VERIFILE prints a contractor badge for each employee that includes a serial number, a photograph and information about the contract company. Badges are printed in e-VERIFILE's Atlanta office using a DTC550 card printer and encoder from Fargo Electronics, Eden Prairie, Minn., and sent directly to the contractors.

Hanes says that Norfolk Southern began using e-RAILSAFE after the railroad's regular employees complained that it was hard to keep track of current contractor employees given that there was such a large number. “There are three times more contractor employees than railroad employees,” he says. Norfolk Southern employed approximately 30,721 employees at the end of 2006. That puts the number of contractor employees at around 90,000.

“Norfolk Southern came to realize that it had a good grasp on its own employees. They knew who they were and what their backgrounds were,” Hanes says. “But we did not have any record of who these contractors were or what risks they posed to us.” The railroad company began testing the system for use in May 2005 and within a few months implemented the system in full. Hanes says the company looked at similar background screening services, but found no one who could perform all of the elements required. Wijesinghe says that offering all of the necessary components together in one service is what sets e-RAILSAFE apart from its competitors.

The opportunity to save manpower and time was also appealing to Norfolk Southern. “It would have been impossible for us to turn out the manpower to complete everything that e-RAILSAFE does for us,” Hanes says. “We have seen tremendous manpower and time-savings as a result.”

e-RAILSAFE charges a one-time signup fee of $99 to set up access to the e-RAILSAFE service. The company charges $37 for each denied applicant and $50 per approved applicant.

Currently, five of the eight Class I railroads operating in the United States and Canada are using e-RAILSAFE. They include Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) and Conrail railways. CSX Transportation and Kansas City Southern have not yet implemented e-RAILSAFE.

e-RAILSAFE is one of several industry-focused contractor screening management systems developed by e-VERIFILE.

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

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