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10 Things to Consider Regarding the Use of At-Home Researchers

1. Privacy: You are directly responsible for making private information viewable and printable on people’s home computers.
2. Professionalism: You could have difficulty accurately claiming that at-home researchers are “professionals” when they are unsupervised, unregulated and acting as cheap substitutes for what is supposed to be a professional service. Ask yourself how the sound of barking dogs, crying babies and television sets in the background may strike those asked to provide verifications.
3. FCRA Defensibility: You could find your company defending its practice of using at-home researchers against FCRA section 607(b) concerning reasonable procedures for accuracy.
4. IC Classification: You cannot classify someone as an Independent Contractor (IC) when they work only for you, when you tell them exactly how to do their job, and when they are providing the same core services provided by your in-house staff.
5. Training/QC: You cannot train on and discuss production issues in real time. It is also difficult for at-home researchers to learn from each other when everyone is working in isolation. Furthermore, since everyone works alone it is harder to enforce quality rules across the entire organization.
6. Supervision: Unsupervised at-home researchers are very difficult to supervise. In addition, since they are paid by the completed verification, they may be more tempted to fake orders since there is no one supervising them in real-time.
7. Reliability: You are dependent entirely on the researcher’s priorities, which may not be your own. They may put a hair appointment ahead of your forty new verifications that have to be called today. You want load balancing to be under your control and not secondary to at-home researcher’s personal schedules.
8. Hidden Costs: There are hidden costs to managing and maintaining multiple remote researchers as opposed to a central pool of talent. Take for instance the time lost to the unreliable performance of at-home researcher’s internet connections, home computers and printers.
9. Due Diligence: You risk significant legal exposure if your at-home researcher’s performance falls below a professional standard of care due to lack of training and supervision.
10. Disclosure: Would you want to disclose to your customers that the sensitive, personal data and professional service they’ve entrusted you with was being performed by unsupervised home workers?

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