Criminal Background Check - South Korea and United States

Well I've recently interviewed and was offered a position with a teaching agency that functions like a substitute teaching agency in the States. The nice thing about this agency is that it works hard to find you teaching spots beyond just individual sick days to fill in with longer term assignments. And many of the teachers who have begun as temporary teachers have ended up being offered full time positions from the schools they worked at.  I was pretty excited to get this offer about a week ago on the same day I interviewed with them. They even had a few teaching positions they thought would fit me well as an ESL teacher. Now in order to work with children here in the UK you have to do a criminal background check. For those from the UK that is easy enough they simply have to fill out some paperwork and pay a fee and the government will run the necessary check and send the information to the company. Where this can get complicated is that they require a similar background check from any country that you have lived in for over six months in the past five years. So for me that includes the States and South Korea. My time in China ended in just under six months so I don’t have to deal with them.

So last week I began the task of figuring out how to get criminal background checks from Korea and the States. I was more worried about getting if from Korea than America since as an American I just figured it would be easier.

In order to get the background check from Korea I found out I had to go to the South Korean Embassy in downtown London near Buckingham Palace. I had to fill out a form that they must then officially stamp, provide them copies of my passport and visa to Korea, submit a passport size photo of myself and prepay a shipping company (in this case DHL) for mailing the results back to me. Now I could do all of those things in the Embassy except the prepaying DHL to send me back my results. What the Embassy was able to do to me was provide me with a Waybill from DHL. A Waybill is an account already set up and ready to be paid for once you provide the necessary information. The Waybill comes with a preexisting code that is already in DHL’s system. With this code you can go online, enter it and it will calculate the costs and allow you to pay for the package being sent to you. Well that is how it is supposed to work. The problem I had with DHL is that you have to go through DHL Korea, which functions separately from DHL UK. So you have to go to the Korean website. Now the website can be translated into English so that is no problem but in order to pay online your computer has to have a specific software plug-in, which I guess is common in Korea. My computer did doesn't have that plug-in so I couldn't pay online. Now I tried to get the plug-in but it wouldn't download onto my computer or at least it wouldn't work properly when I did download it. So in order to pay I have to send them an email with all my credit card information. I hate doing that because it opens one up to being charged a lot more than one should be but I don’t have a lot of options as of now and I’m just going to watch my account carefully and maybe warn my credit card company about it. Once all of that stuff is done you still have to take everything (the form, copies, photo and Waybill) and mail it to the proper office in Korea.

Now the nice thing about Korea is that the service is free so you simply have to pay for shipping both to get the application to Korea and get the results back to the UK. All in all I’m going to end up paying 35 to 40 pounds in shipping costs. That is about 50 to 55 dollars. The shipping cost can, of course, be a lot more if you want to be for next day shipping or things like that. I found that Royal Mail gave by far the best deal for shipping to Korea. It cost me about 8 pounds whereas to get the same package delivered by UPS, FedEx or DHL was going to cost at least 30 pounds for basically the same service. For those who need more information about this service just go to the Korean Embassy’s website and it will have the form you need and all the other information.

With the United States things are a bit more complicated or maybe I should just say they are more expensive. With the States one can get a criminal background check from any individual state and each state has their own rules on how to do that but in this case a single State’s background check is not enough I have to get a federal background check. A federal background check comes from the FBI. To do this the FBI requires the submission of your official fingerprints on their specific form along with their application. Now the fingerprints didn't seem like a big deal until I did some research in the UK and discovered just how expensive fingerprints are to get. In order to get fingerprints from the police in London I would have to wait 2 to 4 weeks for an appointment and pay 72 pounds (almost $110). Through some online research I was able to find a company in London that specializes in doing official fingerprinting for companies and individuals it is called UK Fingerprints. I was able to book an appointment with them this week on Wednesday and while they are cheaper than the police I still have to pay 65 pounds (almost $100) to get them done. Then of course I have to pay for shipping to get this stuff to the FBI and unlike Korea the service is not free. It costs $18 for the FBI to provide this service. So for my official background check from the States I’m going to end up paying somewhere between 130 to 140 dollars. For those needing a federal background check from the States look at the FBI’s website it will give you the details and here is the link to the FBI’s official fingerprint card a person needs to use to get their fingerprints done.

Now both of these requests are going to take a minimum of 2 weeks to get proceed and mailed back to me. So there is no way I will be able to even look for teaching jobs through this agency for at least another 3 weeks probably longer. The big downside to that is that the spring term is drawing towards a close and substitute teaching jobs become a lot more sparse during the summer.  

Oh and to top it off I do still have to get a background check from the UK, which will cost me another 50 pounds (about $75). So all and all it is going to cost me at least 250 dollars to prove it is okay for me to work with children. Now while I completely understand why they require a person to do all of this it is still a pain in the ass to do it all. For anyone else out there going through the same thing good luck.