About
About this site
FBIBackgroundCheck.org is a reference library about the FBI Identity History Summary — what it is, how it is requested, how it is authenticated, and what individual destination countries do and do not require. It exists to explain.
Why it exists
The primary material on this subject is public, but it is scattered across the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services pages, the Code of Federal Regulations, the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Authentications, the Hague Conference’s status table, and the immigration authority of whichever country the document is going to. Reading it in the right order is most of the work.
The rest of the work is knowing when the material is silent. A great deal of what circulates about FBI background checks — processing times above all — is not published by anyone with the authority to publish it. This site records those silences as findings rather than filling them, which is why several pages here end in “no authority publishes this” instead of a number.
What is here
- Articles
- 8
- Country guides
- 23
- Research reports
- 4
- Glossary entries
- 26
- Interactive tools
- 5
How it is written
Every factual claim carries a citation to a primary source, and the references section of each page is generated from the citations in that page’s body — it cannot drift out of sync with the text above it. Sources are government publications, official registers, and the instruments themselves; news coverage and commercial pages are not sources here. The full rules are published, permanently, under Standards.
What this site will not do
- It does not name, rank, rate, or link to commercial providers, including those operated by its own publisher.
- It does not process requests, submit fingerprints, or check the status of anything. It has no access to any government system.
- It does not give legal or immigration advice.
- It does not publish a processing-time estimate the responsible agency has not published.
- It does not collect your name, your documents, or anything you type into a tool.
Who publishes it
FBIBackgroundCheck.org is published by Consumer Science, LLC, which also operates commercial businesses in adjacent fields, including document authentication services. That is a real conflict of interest, and the way it is managed — no vendor links, no lead capture, no commercial calls to action anywhere on this site — is set out in full in the transparency statement.