Proving a Negative

Ladies and gentlemen, today we confront a quiet but profound question:

Can you prove a negative?

I was at a concert recently (at the Underground Music Collective in Minneapolis—check it out if you’re in the area). The performer had written a song based on the Fresno Nightcrawlers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresno_nightcrawler). Her claim? “Science can’t prove they don’t exist.”

Well, you can’t prove I’m not a Formula 1 racecar driver although there is abundant evidence to the contrary.

Which got me thinking (like all things do) about background checks.

How do you prove a negative? How do you confirm the absence of something?

It’s easy (relatively speaking) to prove something exists. We find and prove criminal records every day. Empirical evidence and all that. Observation, experience, experiment.

And there are types of negatives:

• Hard negatives: Claims about the complete absence of something across all of time, space or possibility, are genuinely difficult or impossible to prove. “This person has never lied in their life,” is an example.

• Bounded negatives: Claims about the absence of something within a defined scope—are routinely provable. “This person has no felony convictions in these three jurisdictions over the past seven years,” is a good example. Background screening is almost entirely the business of proving bounded negatives.

How do we prove a bounded negative?

1. Define the domain clearly. Scope matters enormously. A criminal record check limited to one jurisdiction proves much less than a national search. Ambiguous scope is the enemy of a valid negative finding.
2. Ensure completeness of the source. The negative is only as valid as the record system being searched. If a court doesn’t report to a national database, absence from that database proves nothing about that court’s records.
3. Document the search methodology. A negative finding needs to be traceable. What was searched, where, when and how. Without this, you haven’t proven a negative, you’ve simply failed to find something.
4. Close off alternative explanations. If a record could exist but be sealed, expunged or held in a jurisdiction you didn’t check, the negative finding has a caveat that must be acknowledged.

Proving a negative in background screening is not only possible, but also our core product. The discipline lies in being precise about what domain was searched, how thoroughly, and what the remaining gaps are — so that a "clean" result is a meaningful, defensible finding rather than just a failure to look hard enough.

Courts are run like everything else. With people. So, Donovan Smith has no records. But Donavon Smith (subtle difference) with the same DOB does. And it’s our job to suss out the subtle differences.

And we do a bang-up job of that. Searching not only Jeffery, but Jeffrey because people who keep records make mistakes in name spellings all the time.

We don’t just search what’s in front of us. We search deep, making sure we can prove that negative.

Want to know what it’s like to work with a company that goes this deep? Reach out to me at (612) 743-0240 or grab time on my calendar https://calendly.com/ann-ceverify/30min.

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