Corporate Intelligence Consultants

Corporate Intelligence Consultants In 1977 Richard Cotner and his son Steven began helping businesses combat a growing employee theft problem.

Corporate Intelligence Consultants [CIC] is a Toledo, Ohio area corporate investigations firm offering pre-employment screening services, background checks, surveillance and security consultation. As licensed investigators Dick and Steve knew they had not only the expertise but the creativity needed to stop ongoing theft, prevent new theft and save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. This

was the beginning of Corporate Intelligence Consultants. As companies’ concerns moved from employee theft and security to drugs in the workplace, workers’ compensation fraud, and embezzlement, the CIC team would hear over and over from business owners the same sentiment: “If only I had known before I hired this person what he was like.” This thinking lead to the development of CIC’s Pre-Employment Screening division in 1980.

There is a quiet assumption running through a lot of hiring right now: that faster is the same as better.Click a button,...
06/05/2026

There is a quiet assumption running through a lot of hiring right now: that faster is the same as better.

Click a button, get a result, move on. The whole pitch for automated screening rests on speed. And I understand the appeal. HR teams are stretched, hiring is urgent, and anything that shortens the timeline looks like a win.

But screening was never really a speed problem. It is a judgment problem.

Here is what I mean. A background check is not a box you tick. It is a series of small reads. A date that does not quite line up. An employer that confirms a title but hesitates on the dates. A degree from a school that technically exists but does not quite hold up under a second look. None of those are flags a system trips on automatically. They are things a person notices, pauses on, and decides to chase.

That pause is the entire job.

When you hand screening to a tool that returns an instant pass, you are not just buying speed. You are removing the moment where a trained investigator would have stopped and said, “wait, let me look at this again.” The fast answer and the right answer are not always the same answer, and the gap between them is exactly where a bad hire slips through.

We have spent 49 years in that gap. Our people are licensed investigators and former law enforcement, and what they bring is not faster data entry. It is the instinct to know when something is off and the patience to find out why. A machine can tell you what a record says. It cannot tell you what a record is hiding.

None of this is an argument against technology. We use plenty of it. It is an argument for keeping a human in the seat where judgment actually matters, because when a hire goes wrong, “the system approved it” is not a sentence any HR director wants to say out loud.

The convenient answer and the careful answer will not always agree. When they do not, which one would you rather have made?

06/04/2026

5 reasons handing your background checks to an AI tool may cost you more than it saves.
Below.
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Quick one for the HR pros in our network.A lot of companies think buying an AI hiring tool hands the legal risk over to ...
06/01/2026

Quick one for the HR pros in our network.

A lot of companies think buying an AI hiring tool hands the legal risk over to the software vendor. Under Title VII, it works the other way around. If the tool screens applicants in a way that disproportionately affects a protected group, the employer is the one held responsible, even with no intent to discriminate.

A federal court made this very real this year. In February, it authorized collective notice in Mobley v. Workday, a case alleging the platform’s AI screened out applicants aged 40 and older.

The takeaway is not to fear the technology. It is to know what you own when you use it. If your tool makes a decision, you are accountable for that decision.

Want to talk through your screening process with people who have done this for 49 years?

Call us at 419.874.2201, or the contact link is in the comments.

Tag an HR pro who should see this.

1 in 4 job seekers has lied on their resume (Resume Builder, January 2025).After 49 years of looking, we know where most...
05/28/2026

1 in 4 job seekers has lied on their resume (Resume Builder, January 2025).

After 49 years of looking, we know where most of those lies live. Three places to check before you make an offer.

1. Employment dates. A two-month gap between roles quietly becomes "May 2022 to June 2022" instead of "August 2022." Verify the dates directly with the employer, not just from what was written on the page.

2. Job titles. "Senior Manager" on the resume turns out to be "Manager" in HR records. The promotion that was promised but never made it into the system. Easy to inflate, easy to confirm.

3. Education. "Bachelor's in Marketing" sometimes turns out to be "completed coursework toward a Bachelor's." Diploma mills and unaccredited programs slip past automated checks. A direct registrar call catches what the database misses.

We have seen all three this quarter in NW Ohio. Most of the time the candidate did good work somewhere. The story just was not the one written on the page.

Our Expertise. Your Peace of Mind.

🔍 Save this for your next hire.

Contact link in the comments.

On March 16, the 10-day I-9 fix window quietly disappeared.For nearly 30 years, employers had a grace period to correct ...
05/27/2026

On March 16, the 10-day I-9 fix window quietly disappeared.

For nearly 30 years, employers had a grace period to correct common Form I-9 errors during an inspection. ICE eliminated it without a Federal Register notice, without proposed rulemaking, and without a public comment period.

What’s now an immediate fine of up to $2,861 per form:
🔍 Missing employee birthdate in Section 1
🔍 Missing hire date or signature
🔍 Incomplete document data in Section 2 (title, number, expiration)
🔍 Missing preparer or translator info in Supplement A
🔍 Remote verification missteps when not properly enrolled in E-Verify

The only defense left is reviewing your I-9 file before you get a Notice of Inspection.

Save this. Share with your HR team.

The work pauses today.We help companies see what others miss. But today there's something bigger to see clearly: the cos...
05/25/2026

The work pauses today.

We help companies see what others miss. But today there's something bigger to see clearly: the cost of the freedom that makes any of this possible.

We're thinking about the families with empty seats today.

5 hallway conversations that deserve a closer look 🔍Most workplace problems don't start with a formal complaint. They st...
05/22/2026

5 hallway conversations that deserve a closer look 🔍

Most workplace problems don't start with a formal complaint. They start as water cooler talk someone almost dismissed.

Swipe through five patterns we've watched turn into investigations over nearly 50 years of corporate intelligence work.

Save this for your next HR review. Tag an HR pro who'll appreciate it.

Contact link in the comments.

05/21/2026

12 months. That's how long the average insider fraud case runs at a financial institution. Here’s 5 ways to shorten it.
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Here in NW Ohio, our credit unions and community banks have always run on trust. That trust is exactly what makes inside...
05/20/2026

Here in NW Ohio, our credit unions and community banks have always run on trust. That trust is exactly what makes insider fraud so quiet, and so hard to spot.

The 2024 ACFE Report to the Nations puts the median time to detect occupational fraud at 12 months. Banking and financial services led every other industry studied. Recent NCUA enforcement orders show the trend is picking up speed.

A few things we're seeing more of:

🔍 Staff reductions have stretched segregation of duties thin. One employee with broad system access can move quietly for months.

🔍 Remote and hybrid hires need the same vetting as on-site. A recent federal case involved a credit union work-from-home hire who began stealing member account data within weeks.

🔍 Tenure tracks with loss size. ACFE data shows that the longer the perpetrator has been with the organization, the larger the loss tends to be. Periodic re-screening of long-tenured staff matters.

For credit unions and community banks, prevention starts before the badge is issued. Background checks, credential and employment verification, credit screening where allowed, and periodic re-screening for high-access roles. Bonding covers losses after the fact. It does not prevent them.

When was the last time your team reviewed its screening process? If it's been a while, give us a call at 419.874.2201, or tap the link in the comments.

Tag an HR or compliance pro who should see this.

(Source: ACFE 2024 Report to the Nations, NCUA enforcement orders.)

Address

P. O. Box 444
Perrysburg, OH
43552

Opening Hours

Monday 8:30am - 5pm
Tuesday 8:30am - 5pm
Wednesday 8:30am - 5pm
Thursday 8:30am - 5pm
Friday 8:30am - 5pm

Telephone

+14198742201

Website

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