Newest article from Raj Ananthanpillai on Forbes
Background screening is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Approximately 95% of U.S. employers run checks on candidates, and the US market alone was about $5 billion in 2025 and has traditionally grown at about 6%.
In addition, recent projections indicate hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs could emerge in the coming years, with reshoring announcements alone nearing 240,000 in 2025 and expectations of further acceleration through 2030 amid supply chain security priorities and geopolitical shifts.
Combined with rapid growth in related areas like construction and infrastructure, this wave of job creation, which could add hundreds of thousands of positions across high-turnover and skilled-trade roles, will significantly strain traditional hiring pipelines and screening processes.
As companies race to staff new facilities and scale operations quickly, delays from slow, heavily regulated background checks risk missing out on talent, inflating onboarding costs, and heightening compliance and safety exposures in time-sensitive environments. Portable, reusable, high-assurance, user-verified background screening solutions are urgently needed to enable seamless, high-volume hiring and keep pace with the expected surge in job opportunities across industries.
Traditional background checks are slow, expensive, opaque, and error-prone. They trigger a steady stream of FCRA class-action lawsuits, with filings rising sharply in recent years. Identity fraud and a barrage of AI-generated resumes continue to cost Americans tens of billions annually. At the same time, individuals remain powerless spectators in a process that derails job offers or gig opportunities, often without ever seeing the background report that sank their chances.
A new model emerging is the portable and reusable background check. A single, reusable digital trust credential that an individual verifies once, controls completely, and shares selectively. This approach builds on proven concepts such as TSA PreCheck and mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and extends them to employment, online platforms that provide care services, and dating apps. It promises dramatic improvements in convenience, cost, regulatory burden, and fairness.
The Broken Status Quo
Today’s background checks are governed primarily by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). When a third-party consumer reporting agency (CRA) assembles records from public databases, court files, or other sources and sells a “consumer report” to an employer, the entire process is heavily regulated. Employers must:
- Provide a clear disclosure and obtain written authorization before running the check.
- Issue a “pre-adverse action” notice if the report contains negative information, wait a reasonable period, then send a final adverse-action notice with the report and FCRA rights.
- Ensure the information is accurate and up to date.
These safeguards exist because a third-party data aggregator may provide a report to the employer or relying party about the first party (individual) without the individual’s knowledge, creating friction and significant delays.
In high-turnover industries such as the gig economy, ridesharing, delivery, hospitality, or retail, cumulative expenses are enormous. Delays of days or weeks are common while county courthouses respond or manual reviews occur. And because each new employer or platform runs its own check, the same person may be screened dozens of times in a year.
Worse, individuals have almost no visibility. Most people only learn about problems when they are denied an opportunity. Errors—such as similar-name matches, outdated records, and expunged cases that still appear—are common.
Meanwhile, sensitive personal data proliferates across countless company databases, creating massive targets for breaches. The result is a system that is simultaneously over-regulated for businesses and under-protective for individuals.
The Portable Alternative
But imagine a world where an individual opts in once for a comprehensive, privacy-first verification process. This includes government-issued ID verification, biometric liveness detection to prevent deepfakes, checks against court records for criminal or civil issues, education and professional licenses, sanctions lists, and other relevant sources.
They review all information in a secure dashboard, dispute and correct any errors immediately, and then receive a digitally signed credential stored in their smartphone wallet as a token. This credential is portable and selective:
- It uses tokenization and zero-knowledge proofs, so the verifier receives only the exact answer needed (e.g., “No disqualifying felony convictions in the past 7–10 years” or “Valid professional license as of today”) without seeing raw data.
- The credential is continuously monitored, so it updates in near real time if a new record appears, a license expires, or a license is renewed.
- Sharing is explicit and revocable: the user taps “Share Credential” for a specific purpose, and access can be revoked instantly.
The process mirrors TSA PreCheck and mobile driver’s licenses (mDL). But it goes further by incorporating background attributes and giving the individual (first party) full visibility and control.
A portable, user-controlled credential system delivers four core benefits. It dramatically improves convenience by turning weeks of hiring delays into minutes, enabling workers to share a single verified credential across platforms without repeated uploads or background-check bottlenecks. It reduces costs by eliminating redundant screening fees, shrinking sensitive data storage, lowering cyber risk, and speeding onboarding.
It eases regulatory pressure because individuals initiate, review, and share their own verified credentials, often simplifying FCRA compliance while platforms simply facilitate secure transmission. And it reduces litigation risk by improving accuracy upfront, enabling continuous updates, and creating a consent-driven, auditable system that limits disputes and wrongful claims.
A Better Equilibrium
The current background-check process and ecosystem were built for a pre-digital world of paper records, an industrial age economy, and low-volume hiring. It has scaled poorly into an era of remote work, digital platforms, and AI-driven threats. Portable credentials restore individual agency, shrink data honeypots, accelerate legitimate transactions, and reduce the very frictions and liabilities that regulators and courts have struggled to manage.
Regulatory clarity will accelerate adoption. Guidance from the FTC, CFPB, and courts recognizing that user-controlled, first-party verification platforms are not traditional CRAs—and are eligible for Section 230 protections when they act as facilitators rather than compilers of third-party data—would unlock innovation while preserving core consumer protections.
The goal is not to dismantle safeguards but to modernize them. A portable background check does exactly that: it keeps rigorous vetting, adds real-time accuracy and continuous monitoring, and finally gives individuals the visibility and control they have long been denied. In a world desperate for trustworthy digital interactions, this shift from opaque, repetitive, third-party reports to portable, privacy-first credentials may be one of the highest-leverage improvements we can make.
For more coverage check out Small Business Currents coverage on this topic.
AUTHOR POST | Paid Program
Raj Ananthanpillai is a serial entrepreneur, investor, inventor, and leading authority on digital trust, identity, and privacy. He is the founder and CEO of Trua, where he is building privacy-first digital trust credentials that allow organizations to verify identity without losing control of their personal data.
With decades of experience designing large-scale identity and risk systems, Raj has founded and scaled multiple technology companies serving federal agencies and global enterprises. He holds two master’s degrees in engineering and physics and is the inventor on several U.S. patents focused on trust, security, and privacy-preserving systems. He is also the author of two previous books.
In The Trust Crisis, Raj outlines a new model for restoring digital trust and data ownership. He is also an in-demand expert speaker and advisor on digital identity, privacy, and the future of trust.