Personal opinion: I doubt the federal government mandates that third party vendors searching PUBLIC records need background checks.  If that were so, we'd be submitting them every time we asked a Town Clerk to enter their records vault or when our friends in India perform an online search.  FEAR tactics. They are passing the expense and, hopefully, the liability down the hill. My GUESS is this is a page from the Lender's Compliance Handbook and ALTA best practices: require everyone who sees or has hands on Non-public Personal Information to submit to regular background and credit report check.

How this applies to title searchers/abstractors is beyond me.  You are searching PUBLIC records. If the searching company outsources to India, what are their employee background and credit checks like?  Do they use a U.S. Company for the checks?

Wonder if they require all their employees to go through this?  Who pays the cost and why only two specific for-profit organizations. What's the relationship?  I have heard nasty rumors of background and credit report checks every 3 months.  FEAR and PANIC because the moment a background check is done it is obsolete.  Fear of an employee or third party vendor with financial troubles using consumer data to steal identities to obtain money.

Thank you Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and all those organizations writing their own Best Practices Manuals.