Stop what you’re doing right now and ask yourself this question: How well do you know your drivers? When you hired them, you might have asked if they had criminal records. It’s almost certain that you didn’t ask if they had ever been fingerprinted.

So what are you going to do when they call you from the border to let you know they’re being refused entry to the U.S. and that your load is stuck?

That kind of call is becoming more and more likely, given the Americans’ desire to keep undesirable visitors from clearing customs. It goes far beyond weeding out guys who got busted with an ounce of Acapulco gold back in college.

If one of your guys pulls up to customs and gets asked if he’s ever been fingerprinted — and he forgets the one time it happened because there were no subsequent convictions or fines or consequences whatsoever — and the guard punches a few buttons and finds out his memory’s wrong, your truck is not going into the U.S. of A.

The time to rifle through your HR files — and do whatever you can to help your employees wipe their slates clean — is now.

Here’s what you should know:

Criminal records do not disappear with age; If the cops have ever fingerprinted somebody over a matter relating to some criminal activity — even if there was no conviction — the records are in the system. American border officials can access them in moments and are liable to refuse entry to somebody who denies — or forgets — having been fingerprinted.

If a person has a record, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is going to find it sooner rather than later. And that poor bloke will be denied access to the U.S.

Ian Levine is the program director at Pardons Canada, a federal non-profit organization set up under Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) to help people remove past criminal offences from the public record. He can help your people re-write their histories to ensure their futures.

There are two issues here: persons with actual criminal records are prohibited from entering the U.S., so the driver must have the record erased before DHS finds it; and, because DHS now does fingerprint record searches, drivers who have been fingerprinted in the past — even if they were not convicted — will show up in a search, which will raise eyebrows at the border.

He says records for anyone who has ever been accused of a crime will be in the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) database and DHS has access to that file.

U.S. Customs used to ask drivers if they have a criminal record. Sometimes, they’d ask if the person was ever convicted of an offence. Today, they’re more likely to ask if you’ve ever been fingerprinted. That might be a bit harder to lie about. Levine says if they’re curious, they’ll swipe the driver’s passport through the reader, punch a button, and voila, if the driver has ever been fingerprinted, a six-digit number pops up on the screen — a FPS number. Just like that.

And even if your HR people have gone to the trouble of having a police record search done by your local or regional police force and come up clean, you’re not necessarily off the hook. Because of the length of time it takes for a CPIC search (up to four months for personal inquiries), chances are that search didn’t include an RCMP background check or that a record in some other jurisdiction wouldn’t have appeared. “That doesn’t mean you’re clean,” Levine says. “It just means that you don’t appear in the local police files.”

And — get this — drivers who may not have criminal records due to a not-guilty finding, or a dismissal of charges, etc., are in the database too. Simply having a fingerprint record is not the problem: if the driver doesn’t admit to the record when asked — because he forgot about it or didn’t know that it existed, that’s when DHS is likely to take action, possibly turning the truck around.

“The fact remains,” says Levine, “that if fingerprints were taken, they will be on file. It’s up to you to do something about it before those old records hang you. Put yourself in the shoes of the guy at the border: he’s sworn to protect his country, and he’s just found your fingerprint record. What do you think is going to happen?”

The first problem is that many people honestly don’t know their name is in the CPIC database, or they assume that because — ’til now –they’ve managed to get through a primary inspection, all is clear. Tell all your drivers that the best thing to do is to get the record erased, regardless of how insignificant they think it is. And you can help them do it. So first, they have to come clean to you.

Canadian law provides this mechanism and everyone should take advantage of it. By making the record disappear, a person no longer has to admit to it. The DHS won’t find it even if they look. “It takes a 15-minute commitment to erase your record — no lawyers, no courts — just 15 minutes to sign the papers authorizing us to act on your behalf,” Levine points out. “The purpose of everything I’m saying here is to protect the driver. It’s not to generate business. I don’t want waiver business. I want to save their jobs. What we’re really talking about here is how to prevent needing a waiver.”

Levine speculated that some drivers are avoiding FAST applications because they’re afraid of skeletons coming back to haunt them. As their employer, you’re in a position to help them out of this unpleasant wicket, and they’ll thank you for it for years to come.

Do it now, before your luck runs out at the border. The ease with which they can search the database means your number will come up sooner or later. And so will many other people’s records. That, Levine says, is going to create one monster of a backlog in the system.