The University doesn’t know what happened on Nov. 30, 2011.

Rudo Kieft, 46, was arrested on that day on charges of DUI and improper driving, according to an Athens-Clarke County Police report.

Kieft, a research professional at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, blew BACs of 0.136 and 0.149 at the Clarke County Jail after he was arrested. The legal limit in Georgia is 0.08.

The policy for the University System of Georgia requires any employee who is arrested while working for the system to report the arrest, said Duane Ritter, deputy director of University Human Resources.

Background checks are often made in the application process for a job. The Georgia Board of Regents did not require background checks for jobs at the University until 2007. KRISTY DENSMORE/Staff

“If you break the law, you’re supposed to report it,” Ritter said.

Kieft never self-reported his arrest to University Legal Affairs like the USG policy mandates. An open document request to Legal Affairs revealed that it had no documentation regarding Kieft.

Kieft declined to comment to The Red & Black on Tuesday afternoon, saying only he didn’t know he was required to report his arrest.

If a University employee does not self-report an arrest or criminal charge, the University might never know. Complete criminal background checks are only done when an employee is hired — in many cases, a check is never done again.

Any student arrested in Athens is automatically reported to the University Office of Student Conduct, according to a September 2011 Red & Black article. But the same isn’t true for a University employee, even when it’s written on a police report that someone works at the University — such as in Kieft’s case.

The University expects an employee to speak up if an arrest has occurred.

“Once you’re hired, you do have to report that because it’s illegal, so there’s really no point to do another background check,” Ritter said.

The policy mandating background checks upon employment was enacted in 2007 by the Board of Regents. That means any professor, staff member or other employee hired before 2007 has never necessarily had their background checked.

“When the Board of Regents policy came out, we weren’t going to go back and check everybody who was already employed here,” Ritter said.

The exception is a “position of trust,” which includes jobs involving “interaction with children, after-hours access to facilities and access to financial resources,” such as handling money or credit cards, according to USG’s policy. Anyone hired or promoted into a position of trust is background checked.

Promotions from assistant to associate professor don’t require a check, but a promotion from associate professor to department chair or department chair to dean does, according to the policy.

“There aren’t really a lot of individual departments doing separate background checks,” Ritter said.

The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which Kieft works for, doesn’t do periodic background checks to ensure employees haven’t been arrested while working at the University, said administrative manager LeGail Tudor. The department follows USG’s policy.

And what is the department’s stance if an employee fails to report an arrest?

“I’ve never had that happen, so it would be difficult to say,” Tudor said.

She said if she learned of that happening, she would go to her department head. The head would then talk to human resources and legal affairs to find out what step to take next.

“That’s how I would handle it,” Tudor said.

An employee failing to report is exactly what happened at the College of Education in October 2008. Tenured professor Cecil Fore III had served jail time for multiple counts of sodomy and sexual abuse toward children before working at the University, according to a 2008  Red & Black report. Fore gave false information to the University about his past convictions.

When the University found out, he was fired. In documents obtained by The Red & Black for another 2008 article, it was revealed that a “large component” of Fore’s work was to travel to schools to implement “positive behavioral supports to curb school-wide discipline.”

After the events involving Fore, the College of Education doesn’t perform periodic background checks, said Andy Garber, business manager for the College of Education.

“It’s not a common practice,” Garber said. “That’s something that’s usually just done at the point of hire.”

As for the department’s policy if an employee doesn’t report an arrest, Garber said it would depend on the circumstances.

“I don’t know of any college policy that’s in place,” he said.

When an employee self-reports an arrest, the form sent to Legal Affairs asks the employee their position at the University, if they work in a position of trust and information about the arrest, according to documents obtained by The Red & Black.

The employee’s supervisor then fills out the rest of the form, explaining the caliber of the employee and if the arrest is “a symptom of a bigger problem with his employment.”

Ritter said he wasn’t sure how often people self-report their arrests. He said it’s against the law not to.

“It’s certainly something that could happen,” he said, “but hopefully that’s not the case.”

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