How we check

Where facts come from

In order of preference:

1. The company's own pages: careers sites and FAQs, job postings on its own careers site, applicant privacy and background check disclosures, help centers, account agreements, fee schedules, annual and impact reports, and official announcements.
2. Membership lists published by the organizations themselves, such as the Second Chance Business Coalition and the Bank On certified account directory.
3. Government sources: federal agencies, court and EEOC records, state licensing boards.
4. Established news outlets, only for facts they attribute to the company.

We read forums, review sites and other “companies that hire felons” lists to find leads. We never cite them, and nothing goes on a page until we've confirmed it on a source above. Every source on a page was opened on the date shown.

How we label an employer

Each employer gets one of four stances, based only on what is on the record:

• Public commitment: coalition membership, a published second-chance program, or the company's own statement that it hires people with records. We list signing the 2016 White House Fair Chance Business Pledge on a company's page, but on its own it doesn't earn this label unless the company has restated it since, because signers were never asked to renew it.
• Reviews records case by case: the company says a record is reviewed individually and doesn't automatically disqualify.
• Publishes its screening rules: the company publishes its screening rules, as most gig apps do.
• No published policy: nothing public. This says nothing about whether the company hires people with records in practice.

A stance is not a promise. Hiring decisions are made by people, for specific roles, under state and local laws that differ. We don't publish hiring odds, star ratings or “felon-friendly” scores, because no public data supports them.

How we read bank accounts

Fees, opening deposits and overdraft rules come from each provider's product page, fee schedule or account agreement. For ChexSystems and Early Warning Services we record exactly what the provider says:

• “Says it doesn't check” only when the provider says so on its own pages.
• “Says no credit check” when it says there's no credit check. That is not the same as skipping ChexSystems, and we don't treat it as such.
• “May check” when the account agreement says it can pull a banking-history report.
• “Not stated” when we couldn't find either.

Apps that aren't banks are labeled that way, with the partner bank that holds your money.

How we check voting rights

Each state's voting rules come from its constitution and election law, or from its election office's own pages, and we cite the section. Trackers kept by research and advocacy groups help us find the law, but we never cite them, and anything we can't confirm on an official page is marked “not confirmed” instead of filled in. We check every state for new laws, court rulings and ballot measures, a second reader checks each state before it goes up, and the site won't publish a state with a stage-by-stage answer that contradicts its headline answer.

How we keep pages current

Every page shows the date it was last checked, and a second reader checks each record before it's published. Each kind of record has a re-check deadline: bank accounts every 90 days, voting rights every 90 days, record-clearing law every 120 days, and employers and “Can I” answers every 180 days.

Every week, a script opens every source we cite and flags any that break, move or change, and those records go to the top of the re-check list. A page more than 30 days past its deadline says so at the top instead of looking current. Each re-check is logged, so a date can't change without one, and every change is listed on What changed.

Corrections

If something is wrong or out of date, email contact@secondchanceindex.com with the page and what you found. Companies can send us a link to an official statement. We confirm every report against an official source before changing a page, and we correct errors as soon as they're confirmed.

Money and independence

We pay for the research with labeled sponsorships and, on some bank account pages, labeled paid links. Payment never changes a fact, a stance, a score, whether something is listed or the order of a list. See our disclosures and sponsorship rules.