At the end of August 2017, legislative work has started to set out principles of checking clean criminal records of applicants for employment in the entities of the financial sector.

A list of entities that will benefit from the law covers, inter alia, banks, international financial institutions, insurers, the Polish Export Credit Agency (KUKE), insurance agents and brokers, loan institutions, electronic money institutions, payment institutions and organizations, investment fund management companies and brokerage houses, as well as entities providing services to banks or insurers under so-called outsourcing.

According to the draft, these rules would be applicable to candidates looking for employment on the basis of a contract of employment, contract of mandate, service contract, contract of specific work, the agency contract or under another contract of a similar nature in the territory of Poland. Employers who are financial entities would have the right to ask the candidate to provide information on whether he or she was convicted by final judgment for a deliberate offense set forth in the law. A directory of offenses includes offenses classified in the Penal Code (e.g. offenses against documents, property, information protection, economic activity), as well as the penal provisions of sectoral laws (e.g. the banking law, the law on consumer credit, the law on instruments in trading financial, the law on financial market supervision, the law on payment services).

A directory of offenses includes offenses classified in the Polish Penal Code (e.g. offenses against documents, property, information protection, economic activity), as well as the penal provisions of sectoral laws (e.g. the banking law, the law on consumer credit, the law on instruments in trading financial, the law on financial market supervision, the law on payment services).

As a rule, the candidate will be expected to provide information about his or her clean criminal record in the form of a statement. However, at the request of the employer, the candidate will be required to submit a certificate of no criminal record from the National Criminal Register (Polish: Krajowy Rejestr Karny – KRK) (the certificate must not be older than three months); while the financial entity will be obliged to reimburse the applicant for the information received from the KRK. If a person applying for a job fails to present criminal record information or a KRK certificate at the request of the employer, such employer may decide not to enter into an employment relationship with the applicant or not to conclude any other co-operation agreement.

If a person applying for a job fails to present criminal record information or a KRK certificate at the request of the employer, such employer may decide not to enter into an employment relationship with the applicant or not to conclude any other co-operation agreement.

The proposed regulation would apply from 1 January 2018. We will keep you posted on further legislative work in this regard.