Supervisors Order Checks on All New Hires in Ventura

Spurred by the case of a county mental health manager who hid a felony record, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to require criminal background checks of all new employees--from janitors to high-level managers.

The county will hire an outside firm to do criminal record and driver’s license checks, at a cost of $25 to $50 each. And in the cases of some upper-level managers, the checks will be used to verify education, Social Security numbers and credit records.

Some county departments, including the district attorney, sheriff and probation, already conduct background checks. The new policy will not affect those departments. But some existing employees who are up for promotion could face investigations.

Until now, applicants for most county jobs have only been required to state whether they have ever been convicted of a felony.

Supervisors requested the new policy after investigators last year learned that Kevin DeWitt, the county’s former mental health administrator, had used a phony doctoral diploma and bogus transcripts to land his $83,000-a-year job. Investigators discovered that DeWitt had been convicted 10 years ago of eight bank fraud charges for writing fake references on loan documents while he was a bank’s junior loan officer in Louisville, Ky.

DeWitt was sentenced to 120 days in jail in March after pleading guilty to a felony count of using forged documents.