Fingerprint Background Checks and Challenging an FBI Record

What is on an FBI identity history summary?

The document people call a rap sheet is formally an identity history summary, and it is a compilation rather than an investigation. When a person is fingerprinted at booking, or for certain licensing and employment purposes, the submitting agency sends the prints and the associated information to the FBI's criminal justice information division, which files them against the identity established by those prints.

The summary that results lists the arrests reported, the agencies that reported them, the charges as submitted, and any dispositions those agencies later transmitted. It may also list federal employment and military service fingerprint submissions. Because it is keyed to fingerprints rather than to names, it is more reliable than a name-based search and much harder to defeat with a different spelling.

What it is not is complete. Agencies do not always submit prints, do not always report outcomes, and do not always report them promptly. A person can have a state arrest that never reached the federal file, or a federal entry showing an arrest whose dismissal was never forwarded. Both gaps matter, and they matter in opposite directions.

How do you request your own copy?

There are two routes and they produce the same record. The first is a direct request to the FBI under its departmental order procedure, submitted through the Bureau's electronic system, with fingerprints taken on a standard applicant card and a fee paid at submission. The second is an FBI-approved channeler, a private company authorized to collect the prints and transmit the request, usually faster and priced above the direct route.

1. Start the request — through the FBI's electronic submission site or an approved channeler.
2. Get fingerprinted — at a law enforcement agency, a channeler location, or by mailing a completed standard card.
3. Pay the fee — set by the FBI or the channeler and published on their own pages, since it is revised periodically.
4. Receive the result — electronically for most requests, or by mail where a physical copy was requested.
5. Request a signed hard copy if it is going abroad — many foreign authorities will not accept an electronic version.

That last step is the one people miss. A summary destined for a foreign residence or work permit application normally has to be a physical document bearing an official signature, because it then goes to the US Department of State for an apostille as described in the answer on authenticating documents for use abroad. Ordering the electronic version first and discovering this afterward means starting over.

Why are missing dispositions the biggest problem?

An arrest entry with no recorded outcome is worse than an entry showing a conviction, because a reader has no way to know what happened. Licensing boards, employers and foreign consulates seeing an open arrest frequently treat it as unresolved, and some treat it as an unexplained gap the applicant must account for.

The cause is structural. Fingerprints are submitted at booking, which is a single moment handled by one agency with strong incentives to comply. The disposition happens months or years later in a different institution, the court, and the reporting duty is often less rigorously enforced. Charges dropped before arraignment are the most likely of all to vanish from the reporting chain.

The fix is documentary. Obtain a certified disposition from the clerk of the court that handled the case, showing the charge and the outcome, whether that was dismissal, acquittal, deferred adjudication or conviction. Court clerks issue these routinely, and the mechanics of retrieving an old case file are described in the answer on public access to court records.

How do you challenge an entry that is wrong?

The regulations give you two paths. You can write to the FBI identifying the challenged entry and asking it to verify the information with the contributing agency, in which case the FBI contacts that agency and updates the file if the agency confirms the correction. Or you can go directly to the agency that submitted the entry and ask it to transmit the correction itself.

Going directly to the source is usually faster where you know which agency reported the entry and have the certified paperwork to give them. Routing through the FBI is the better option when you cannot tell which agency submitted the information, or when the contributing agency no longer exists and its records passed to a successor.

A challenge letter should be short and evidentiary. Identify yourself by the identification number printed on the summary, quote the entry exactly as it appears, state precisely what is wrong with it, and attach certified documents rather than copies. Keep proof of what you sent and when. Requests that describe a general injustice without pointing at a specific line rarely produce a change, because the reviewer has to know which record to touch.

Either way, understand the limit on what the FBI can do. It maintains a compilation and will not overrule the agency that supplied an entry. If the arresting agency insists the arrest occurred as recorded, the federal file will continue to reflect that, and the remedy lies with that agency or with a court, not with the Bureau. The Privacy Act provides a parallel route for requesting amendment of a federal record, including the option of attaching a statement of disagreement where the agency declines.

What happens when someone else runs the check on you?

Fingerprint checks run for employment, licensing, volunteering with children, firearms transfers and immigration benefits go to the requesting authority, not to you. Federal regulations require that an applicant who is the subject of such a check be given an opportunity to see the results and to challenge their accuracy before an adverse decision is based on them.

Use that opportunity in writing and immediately. Ask the agency to hold the file open while the challenge runs, and give it the certified disposition or expungement order rather than an explanation. Agencies act on documents, and a narrative account of what happened is not something a licensing board can put in a file as proof.

Firearms transfers run through a separate check keyed to prohibiting categories rather than to the full history, which is why an entry that blocks a purchase may not block a license, and the reverse. What actually disqualifies a person there is set out in the answer on who may not possess a firearm.

Is a commercial background report the same thing?

No, and confusing the two wastes a great deal of effort. Most private employers use a consumer reporting company, which compiles court records from public dockets and commercial data rather than from fingerprints. Those files are not the FBI's, and correcting the federal record does nothing to them.

Commercial reports carry their own error profile. Because they are matched on name and date of birth rather than fingerprints, they mismatch people with common names, report the same case multiple times as it moved through courts, and carry stale entries that a later sealing order should have removed. They are also subject to federal accuracy rules that the FBI file is not.

Disputing one is a defined process: notify the reporting company in writing, identify the item, attach the certified court record, and the company must investigate and respond within the statutory window. The employer must also give you a copy of the report and a window to respond before taking adverse action on it. If both a federal record and a commercial report contain the same defect, you have to fix each in its own channel, because neither custodian corrects the other.