How to Find a Place of Employment in Skip Tracing

Finding a "skip's" place of employment takes both computer expertise and crafty phone skills.

Skip tracing, or the act of finding someone who has disappeared from his last known address without paying his debts ("a skip"), is partly science and partly an art form. The art comes in the way a skip tracer must handle talking to people using her most important tool: the telephone. There is also a bit of an art to "thinking outside the box" to come up with a way to uncover an occasionally elusive piece of information such as a skip's current place of employment.

Instructions

1. Organize every bit of information you do have about your subject. Information like full name, occupation, last known employer's name, address and phone number; last known address, birth date and Social Security number; the full names, phone numbers and last known addresses of spouse, former spouse and any other family members (like parents, siblings and cousins); make and model of car, driver's license number and license plate number will give you a head start.

2. Contact your subject's friends and family. It sounds too easy and obvious, but it's surprising how few people try this obvious technique. Person-to-person contacts with the subject's family and friends is usually the most efficient and convenient way to discover your subject's place of employment. If you converse with them calmly and rationally, you will often get the information you're looking for.

3. Track down your subject further once you know his occupation. If he is serving in the armed forces, a military-locator database will probably find him. Doctors, lawyers or other professionals who belong to an organization or association like the bar association, a medical board, the American Medical Association or an engineering society can be traced through these records.

   Many types of blue-collar workers such as steel workers, machinists, cab drivers, commercial truckers and many other tradespeople belong to trade unions and can be traced through their membership databases.

4. If your skip works in a profession where a professional license and/or an occupational license is required, you can search state licensing bureau databases for current address info. Occupations from private investigators to massage therapists to barbers, hairdressers, nurses and more require state licensing.

5. Find your subject and ask him where he works. If you have used tried-and-true skip-tracing techniques to simply find your subject, you can simply interview him to get his updated information. If your client does not want you to have direct contact with your subject and your budget allows, simply place him under surveillance and follow him to his current place of employment.

Tips & Warnings

• A number of proprietary databases are accessible only to licensed private investigators. These databases contain background information updated on a daily basis. These databases include IRBsearch and SearchAmerica.

References

• "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Private Investigating"; Steven Kerry Brown; 2003
• Maryland's People's Law Library: How Do I Find People?

Resources

• IRB search: Home Page
• SearchAmerica: Home Page