oyees has become so widespread that it may be time for Congress to enact a Fair Criminal Record Reporting Act.

“A criminal record shouldn’t be a life sentence,” Poe told us. But with electronic databases that now routinely reach back to the sixties and even earlier, “something you did 20 years ago will hurt you today,” he adds.

Poe founded ClearMyRecord.com in 1999 to help individuals remove or seal criminal and arrest records and get mention of them removed from electronic databases. The site won’t help people whose arrest involved a sex charge or a minor, but it has helped thousands of others, including, the company reports, one person who won a presidential pardon this year.

Poe says his clients aren’t hardcore or career criminals, since states won’t permit them to clean their records. Most, he said, are minor offenders who made a mistake.

Typical, said Poe, is the case of a former police officer who was arrested for writing bad checks 18 years ago during a nasty divorce. The arrest has prevented the man’s hiring by other departments despite a clean record and steady employment in private security.

In another case, a career postal worker was fired after a periodic background check turned up his 1962 conviction for assault in connection with a Texas bar brawl.

It doesn’t take a felony or even a conviction to give someone a record. “These companies,” Poe said, referring to database firms that buy criminal and arrest records directly from the nation’s 50 states and 3,100 counties, “get all the records then resell them to smaller companies. Employers use these services and don’t (distinguish between) an arrest or a conviction.”

Because ClearMyRecord can’t help everyone convicted of a crime, Poe started Hard2Hire.org as a non-profit job service for ex-offenders. Since launching in June the site has grown to about 2,000 weekly visitors and, says Poe, several companies have agreed to consider hiring ex-offenders.

Poe explains that many companies with blanket policies against hiring ex-offenders may be willing to modify them in certain cases. “We go straight to employers and ask them about their policy,” he said, describing a give-and-take in which he’ll search for the threshold — say a 5- or 10-year-old property crime and clean record since — where a company might relent.

“We see this all the time,” Poe said, “where an old conviction is holding someone back. We need a Fair Criminal Record Reporting Act like the Fair Credit Reporting Act to keep one mistake from being a life sentence.”