Uber will now be bolstering the system of background checks it makes of the drivers on its riding service, TechCrunch reported citing a post on the company's official blog. Uber is a venture-funded startup and Transportation Network Company based in San Francisco, California that makes a mobile application that connects passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire andridesharing services. The company arranges pickups in dozens of cities around the world.
According to the venture backed-startup, it will be doing checks on its new drivers in the US at the federal and county levels. In addition, it will also be conducting these background checks on their current rideshare partners that have not already done so.
The more stringent tests will be done on top of the existing background check system that Uber has been using. Before the announcement, the on-demand riding service has been dependent on the checks that have already been conducted by state and local authorities to commercially license drivers to handle the company's black car, taxi and SUV services. Meanwhile, third party background check provider Hirease takes care of screening drivers of the firm's ridesharing service called Uberx. The company uses the "Multi-State Criminal Database" to do the checks, the report said.
The freshly-rolled out amendments are significant since the said "Multi-State Criminal Database" is not a foolproof system. Pando.com reported last month that an Uberx driver still cleared Uber's background checks even if the driver had a criminal record and served time in prison. That driver allegedly assaulted a client physically and verbally, TechCrunch reported.
Uber, which had raised $258 million in its Series C round led by Google Ventures and has total funding of $307 million so far, explained the pitfalls of relying exclusively on the Multi-State Criminal Database in its blog post saying, "While many counties regularly provide their records to state authorities (who in turn make them available to the Multi-State Criminal Database), some counties do not participate in this reporting the way we and our users expect they should. Similarly, a check relying on the Multi-State Criminal Database may miss records that only exist in the federal database. In our experience, records appearing in one database but not showing up in another is a rare occurrence, but we consider this situation unacceptable all the same."
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