Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

TOPEKA — There has been no known case of identity theft committed by those who oversee birth and death records, but a bill that would allow background checks on new workers in the state’s vital statistics office aims to keep it that way.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment will ask the Legislature to require background checks for prospective employees of the Bureau of Public Health Informatics, said Richard Morrissey, the agency’s deputy director for health.

The bureau maintains records of births, deaths, marriages and divorces.

The national association that represents state registrars who oversee vital statistics has recommended the change, Morrissey said.

“This is intended to prevent exposure of the vital records system to folks working on identity thefts,” he said. “We haven’t had any experience with it, but it’s a preventive measure.”

The National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems has for several years urged states to enact such precautions, said Will Whitman, director of communications for the organization.

“Over the course of time, we as a nation got more serious about these kinds of things and security concerns came to the forefront,” he said. “People who get access to that data all of sudden fell under scrutiny and a lot of states found they had issues. After 9/11 there was a big push to have everyone who was coming into those offices get screened somehow. Many states weren’t doing that.”

“We had a situation last year in which an employee stole blank birth certificate forms,” said Garland Land, the organization’s executive director. “Once they figured who had done it, they went back and looked at the employee’s criminal history and they did indeed have a criminal history before they were hired. They most likely would not have been hired if that background check would have been done.”

The KDHE vital records office currently has procedures in place to protect against the misuse of data, Morrissey said.

“We cross-check births and deaths, for example, so we don’t have a new birth who is also showing up as dead,” he said. “There has always been a strong ethic about protecting that data. This (proposal) is really just an extension of that.”

Land said the number of states that have adopted his group’s recommended policy has increased significantly over the past five years.

“It won’t catch all fraud, but we think that it’s one of the many things that could be done in an office to improve security,” he said.

Kansas already requires background checks before licensing attorneys, gaming and lottery employees, child care workers, physicians, nurses, real estate agents and others. Workers in some state offices are also subject to background checks, including those employed by the Department of Administration, Commission on Veteran’s Affairs or the Division of Vehicles.

The bill could be introduced as early as next week in the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Kristi Pankratz, a KDHE spokesperson.

The KDHE request for background checks won’t be the only one that legislators hear this year.

The Kansas Board of Emergency Medical Services in 2009 requested the ability to do background checks of prospective attendants after learning of EMS workers who had falsified applications for licensure.

The Legislature approved a similar act for the Board of Pharmacy but removed a requirement to collect the fingerprints of EMS applicants, which the board’s executive director said mooted the point because fingerprints are required to check state and federal records.

Robert Waller, the EMS board’s executive director, said he would request a hearing from the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee to reconsider the original version of Senate Bill 222.