This is Jason Cavness with cavnessHR. At cavnessHR, we deliver HR to companies with 49 or fewer people.
For today's HR topic, we're going to talk about the Employee Polygraph Protection Act. Which basically says that you cannot have your employees take a polygraph to see if they're telling the truth or if they're lying about something. But there are some instances where you can have your employees take a Polygraph. But they're very detailed and very limited.
Some of the cases include if they are delivering medical supplies, you can have them take a polygraph. If they're involved with delivering money, if they're an armed car driver, you can have them take a polygraph. Or, you can have them take a polygraph if you reasonably suspect that they've done something wrong like stealing. Even this is very detailed and very limited. They're very strict with limitations. For example, If you have 20 people working for you and you think someone is stealing your supplies, you can't have everyone do your polygraph test.
But here's a good example of when you can do a polygraph test and what you have to do. So the example I usually use is let's suppose you have a car detail shop. You have a customer that goes to you once a week and your customer comes to you one day and says, "Hey, I've been coming for a while. Last three times I've been here I've had stuff stolen out of my car." He describes in detail what's stolen each time. Now, what you can't do, you can't immediately get all your employees and give them a polygraph test. You have to limit it down. So what you can do is determine what employees were there, those three days that the customer was there. Then determine what employees were actually around the car, who actually took care of the car, who had access to the car and have them take the polygraph test.
But then once again, you cannot give it to them because you're not an expert. You have to bring in an employee polygraph expert to do this for you and then have them do the results. So, the Employee Polygraph Protection Act, pretty limited. If I remember correctly these are not even admissible in a court of law. So very limited and this your HR topic for today. Also, a reminder that we also do the cavnessHR podcast every week. Released on Monday on most podcast platforms. We're also on Amazon Alexa now so make sure you check that out. On these we talk to small business owners, founders, people in tech, startups and HR. If you fall into one of these categories, reach out to me about being guest.
Any questions for me about any HR topic, just email me at jasoncavness@cavnesshr.com. Thank you for your time today, and remember, to be great every day.
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