Whether an Old DUI Appears on a Fingerprint Background Check

Attorney Answer

Assume it will show up. The FCRA's seven-year reporting limit does not protect you, because convictions are carved out of it — and a fingerprint-based licensing check is not the kind of report the FCRA limits in the first place.

The governing law, in two parts.

First, the FCRA does not age out convictions. 15 U.S.C. § 1681c(a)(5) bars a consumer reporting agency from reporting "any other adverse item of information, other than records of convictions of crimes which antedates the report by more than seven years." Read the words carefully: the seven-year bar applies to *other* adverse items, and records of criminal convictions are expressly excluded from it. A conviction can therefore be reported no matter how old it is. Whether the offense was in 2004 or 2024, the age of it does not change the answer.

Second — and this is the part most people never hear — the FCRA may not even be the governing law for the check you are worried about. 15 U.S.C. § 1681a(f) defines a "consumer reporting agency" as an entity that regularly assembles or evaluates consumer information for the purpose of furnishing consumer reports to third parties. A fingerprint-based criminal history check that a state licensing board obtains directly from state and FBI criminal history databases is generally not a consumer report furnished by a consumer reporting agency at all. The board is looking at the criminal history record itself. FCRA reporting limits are simply not the rules that apply to it.

Two more practical points. It does not matter that the arrest was in Louisiana rather than Tennessee — fingerprint submissions are run against the FBI's national database, so out-of-state records surface routinely. And passing your employer's background check tells you nothing about what a licensing fingerprint check will return; they are different checks run under different authority against different databases.

What you can do

1. Get your own FBI Identity History Summary before the board does. You are entitled to request it, and it shows you exactly what a fingerprint submission will return — including whether the record is incomplete. 2. Obtain a certified copy of the final disposition from the Louisiana court. Arrests are sometimes reported to the national database without a disposition, and a record showing a charge with no outcome is worse for you than a record showing a completed, resolved case. 3. Answer the licensing application's disclosure questions completely and accurately. Licensing boards treat a failure to disclose far more seriously than an old DUI — non-disclosure is a character issue, the DUI is a history issue. 4. Prepare a short, factual written explanation to accompany the disclosure: what happened, what you completed, and what you have done since. Keep it unemotional and attach the certified disposition. 5. Ask a lawyer whether the conviction is expungeable. Note that expungement of a Louisiana conviction has to be pursued in Louisiana, not Tennessee. 6. Ask the licensing board (or your employer's licensing coordinator) whether this offense is an automatic bar for a Medical Laboratory Scientist licence, or whether it is evaluated case by case. Many boards evaluate rather than disqualify, and knowing which applies changes how much worry this deserves.