If you’re a licensing professional, public safety is your business.
The public counts on you to prevent unqualified people from becoming licensed as nurses, lawyers, cosmetologists, accountants or any other professional your legislature regulates. Licensed professionals account for 20% of the United States’ workforce. Some of your state’s most vulnerable people rely upon agencies like yours to screen applicants and to administer and issue licensure, to perform timely inspections and to follow up with investigations and appropriate enforcement actions.
Lessons in the importance of licensure and effective oversight are never far away, from headlines about illegal child care facilities to news about unlicensed home builders. Protecting the public from unscrupulous people poses a challenge under any circumstance. But it’s particularly difficult when your regulatory agency must rely on paper processes and legacy systems. Automate your regulatory agency’s business process to help speed up data entry and eliminate common mistakes that allow bad actors to slip through the cracks and unsafe conditions to persist.
Learn five tools to use at your regulatory agency to better protect the public—and help your agency fulfill its public-safety mission.
Few things your agency does are more important than performing background checks on people seeking licensure. Failing to get this right harms the public and your agency’s reputation.
In 2019, an Iowa Auditor of State investigation determined that the Department of Public Safety had failed to conduct nationwide background checks before issuing more than 5,800 licenses to private investigators, security guard and bail enforcement officers. As a result, as many as 25 people received “guard card” licenses despite having been charged with aggravated misdemeanors or felonies. Such charges disqualify candidates from licensure.
To help your regulatory agency protect the public and avoid a similar fate, turn to automated interfaces with background check vendors across the country, including the FBI and state bureaus of investigation. Automation allows background data to flow into your regulatory system on whatever schedule your agency requires, ensuring up-to-date and accurate information. To facilitate timely processing, notify staff automatically when you receive that background-check information.
Ensure you use a CJIS-compliant vendor for your regulatory system. A CJIS-compliant vendor meets data security standards from the Criminal Justice Information Center.
How GL Solutions’ clients use our interfaces and system to protect the public:
Bad actors sometimes try to secure licenses or register new businesses by using aliases, new business names and different addresses. If your agency lacks a system that tracks historical data – and especially if it lacks a system at all – foiling such attempts to fool regulators can be extremely difficult. When children get hurt or guns end up in the wrong hands, your agency’s reputation inevitably suffers.
Use your regulatory system to track previous data across records and make all of it available for review and reporting. Such data include names, addresses, licenses, permits and contracts. Track any deleted or changed information in the system. These tracking logs help your agency maintain a visible and reportable audit trail for certain types of records.
Easily meet data retention policies by storing data in the cloud, through Microsoft Azure—also FedRAMP certified.
How historical data tracking helps GL Solutions clients:
Applicants for licensure and renewal must meet stringent requirements, including the submission of documents and other information demonstrating their professional expertise. Keeping track of this information manually, especially in the time of universal licensing, joint compacts and reciprocity agreements, can be difficult and time consuming.
Meanwhile, applicants want to know how the process is going and when their certifications and licenses will be issued. Caught between the need to track detailed requirements and pressure from eager applicants, staff sometimes issue licenses prematurely or without following the proper procedures.
When this happens, public safety is compromised. So is your agency’s reputation.
Consider the 2019 conundrum facing the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission and Kaufman County clerk. During the previous year, a business filed a package store application with the clerk’s office, which is the first step in applying for a license with the state beverage commission. The building that would house the package store had not yet been built, and the proposed location was just outside the Forney city limits. This location sits in a “dry” part of the county, and package stores cannot be built there.
What happened? As part of the application review process, the county clerk is required to ensure that locations for licenses and permits are in “wet” areas. The clerk’s office did not take that step and accidentally certified the proposal and sent it to the state beverage commission, which issued the permit. The state later recognized the clerk’s error, but refused to revoke the license once issued. The county subsequently opted to go to court to prevent the completed package store from selling liquor.
How GL Solutions’ clients use automated application tracking functionality:
A licensing agency’s job doesn’t end when a license or renewal is issued. To protect the public, an agency must investigate facilities and programs following failed inspections. It also must take appropriate enforcement actions to improve conditions or, when necessary, revoke licenses and permits. Failing to conduct investigations and enforcement actions properly can allow unsafe conditions to persist and cast your agency in a bad light.
Despite their importance, investigations and enforcement actions are commonly mishandled. Some agencies lack the necessary process documentation, and others do not have a system that supports the scheduling and automated tracking needed to conduct investigations and enforcement efficiently.
Choose a regulatory system that automates the key components of inspections, investigations and enforcement actions, reducing errors and processing time while enhancing consistency.
How GL Solutions’ clients conduct investigations and enforcement:
Regulatory agencies help keep the public safe by keeping them well-informed. Many licensing agencies meet this obligation by making information about their licensees available on public-facing websites. Such sites are invaluable sources of information for people looking for qualified building contractors or checking the disciplinary histories of doctors and lawyers.
When making such information available, however, it’s crucial to ensure that it’s accurate and up-to-date. Websites that display incorrect or incomplete information can lead the public astray when hiring medical practitioners and other professionals. Inaccurate information also can harm the reputations of your licensees. Meanwhile, reports of incorrect information can consume staff time and anger your agency’s board.
Verification sites need to go beyond simply license status and data obtained. The public—especially for childcare facilities—need to see inspection results and correction action plan measures from these businesses to ensure public safety.
How GL Solutions’ clients use verification websites:
GL Solutions guides you in modernizing your regulatory agency with automated digital licensing and permitting solutions tailored to your unique needs. Learn more on our website about our licensing and permitting regulatory solutions.
