AK · state guide

Alaska background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Alaska has no counties, and that is the fact that decides how a search here is scoped. The state constitution does not leave room for them: article X, section 2 provides that "All local government powers shall be vested in boroughs and cities. The State may delegate taxing powers to organized boroughs and cities only", and section 3 provides that "The entire State shall be divided into boroughs, organized or unorganized." Section 6 then deals with the unorganised borough separately, directing the legislature to provide for services there. A county-by-county search model is not merely inefficient in Alaska; there are no counties for it to run against, and the closest analogs are boroughs, most of which are small and several of which have no court of their own.

The court system describes its own shape in two sentences. "There are two appellate courts in Alaska: the supreme court and the court of appeals. The supreme court was established by the Alaska Constitution, and the court of appeals was created by the Alaska Legislature in 1980." The Supreme Court "includes five justices" and is the highest level of state court; the Court of Appeals hears appeals in "criminal prosecution, post-conviction relief, juvenile delinquency, extradition, habeas corpus, probation and parole, bail, and sentencing matters". The criminal appellate work is therefore concentrated in a court created by statute, and its jurisdiction is criminal rather than general.

The trial courts come in two levels. "The two levels of trial court in the Alaska Court System are the Superior Court and the District Court." The Superior Court is "the trial court of general jurisdiction. There are 45 Superior Court judges located throughout the state", and it "has the authority to hear all cases, both civil and criminal, properly brought before the state courts". The District Court is "a trial court of limited jurisdiction. Its powers are narrower than those of the Superior Court", and it is a court of limited criminal jurisdiction that also serves as the appellate court for its own cases in the other direction, because the Superior Court "serves as an appellate court for appeals from civil and criminal cases which have been tried in the District Court".

The organizing unit is the judicial district, and there are four of them. "The trial courts in Alaska are divided into four judicial districts, whose boundaries are defined by statute." The District Court bench is unevenly spread: "There are currently 20 District Court judges serving in three of the four judicial districts." Below the District Court are magistrate judges, who are "judicial officers of the District Court whose authority is more limited than the authority of a District Court judge", who preside "in areas of the state where services of a full-time District Court judge are not required", and who are not required to be lawyers. The court directory lists 40 trial court locations grouped under the four districts, from Anchorage and Fairbanks down to Angoon, Kake, Galena and Hooper Bay.

Case records are held in one statewide system rather than in county files. The court system names its trial court case management system as CourtView, and it publishes two separate case search routes, one for the trial courts and one for the appellate courts, because "The Alaska Trial Courts include the superior and district courts" while "The Alaska Appellate Courts include the supreme court and court of appeals". Whether the public search covers every location and every year, and what a bulk or agency route costs, was not verified for this page: courts.alaska.gov did not answer a direct request from the environment this research ran in and every court quotation here was read through Internet Archive replay, so the page states the structure and not the portal mechanics.

The repository's access list is statutory and it does not name a consumer reporting agency. AS 12.62.160(b) sets out ten routes, from imminent danger to life at (b)(1) through criminal justice agencies at (b)(4) and specifically authorized persons at (b)(6) to the subject of the record at (b)(10). A screening firm acting for an employer appears on none of them. The only route it can use is (b)(8), which is drafted as an open purpose clause and then closes over two categories: information "may be provided to a person for any purpose, except that information may not be released if the information is nonconviction information or correctional treatment information." "Nonconviction information" is defined at AS 12.62.900(18) as an arrest, a filing or a charge considered, where a prosecutor or grand jury elected not to proceed, where the charges were dismissed or the person acquitted, or where there is no disposition, in each case only after "at least a year has elapsed". So the arrest that went nowhere sits outside the general channel, and the practical consequence is that the Alaska report a screening firm obtains for an ordinary employer is a conviction-and-current-offender report.

The release is conditioned twice more, and both conditions are identity conditions. Subsection (c)(3) provides that information "may not be released under this section until the person requesting the information establishes the identity of the subject of the information by fingerprint comparison or another reliable means of identification approved by the department", and subsection (c)(5) provides that "information released under this section may be used only for the purpose or activity for which the information was released". Subsection (c)(4) adds a three-year record-keeping duty on the releasing agency, naming the recipient, the date, the nature of the information and "the statutory authority that permits the release". The department states the practical form on its own page: "You must provide written permission or your fingerprints to an individual or agency requesting criminal justice information for employment or licensing purposes."

The interested-person route is the one that carries the additional categories, and it is confined by the job rather than by the industry. AS 12.62.160(b)(9) permits release, "including information relating to a serious offense", to an interested person "if the information is requested for the purpose of determining whether to grant a person supervisory or disciplinary power over a minor or dependent adult". AS 12.62.900(17) defines the class by the position rather than by the employer's sector, so a school, a clinic, a care provider and a youth program all sit inside it, and a warehouse or a bank does not. Subsection (e) adds that when an interested person requests information under (b)(9), the department "may also obtain a national criminal history record check under AS 12.62.400 if the person submits the fingerprints and fees required for that check". The class that gets the widest state read is also the class that can reach the national check.

The national check is otherwise closed to private requesters, and this is a routing fact rather than a policy preference. The department's page states that "National Criminal History Record information may be released only to government agencies", and offers a private requester two routes, neither of which produces the record: provide "the name and contact number (and client number) of the government agency that has agreed to receive and review national criminal history record check results", or provide "a specific list of disqualifying criteria for the position you are seeking to fill", in which case "The Criminal Records and Identification Bureau will review the record results and will let you know if a given record subject's record contains disqualifying information." The second route returns a determination rather than a record, which means the employer never sees the underlying entry and cannot weigh it, and the person has no copy to dispute.

The record itself is stated by the department to be the central repository rather than a court file. The Criminal Records and Identification Bureau "is the designated central repository for criminal history information in the State of Alaska", the database through which it is maintained is the Alaska Public Safety Information Network, and the department adds that while other criminal justice agencies such as the Alaska Court System may keep public databases, "the summary information that is maintained by the Criminal Records and Identification Bureau is confidential, and may only be released as authorized by law". Court documents are held elsewhere: "To obtain copies of documents you must contact the agency reporting the information. For court documents, contact the court in the jurisdiction that heard your case." A repository answer and a court answer are therefore two different products with two different contents, and the repository answer is the one the statute restricts.

Two mechanisms narrow what a record can be said to show, and neither of them erases. AS 12.55.085(e) lets a court, on discharge without imposition of sentence, "set aside the conviction and issue to the person a certificate to that effect", but AS 12.62.900(19)(B) puts "information that a criminal conviction or sentence has been reversed, vacated, set aside, or been the subject of executive clemency" inside the definition of "past conviction information", and (13)(D) puts the same fact inside "current offender information". Sealing under AS 12.62.180(b) is available on request where the information "beyond a reasonable doubt, resulted from mistaken identity or false accusation", and a person about whom information is sealed "may deny the existence of the information and of an arrest, charge, conviction, or sentence shown in the information". Beyond those two, no Alaska mechanism for clearing a conviction was located in the instruments read for this page.

The federal baseline

Federal law sets the floor here as it does everywhere. It is at 15 U.S.C. §1681 et seq., it binds the agency and the employer separately, and it does not vary by state. The FCRA article covers it section by section, including the seven-year limits, the salary threshold and the adverse action sequence, so that this page does not restate any of it.

What follows is only the overlay: what Alaska adds on top of that floor, and where it departs from it.

What Alaska law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Alaska law. Where a row says “federal only”, the state has set nothing and 15 U.S.C. §1681c governs.

Adverse action here

The federal sequence applies unchanged: pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report and the summary of rights, a reasonable opportunity to dispute, then the adverse action notice with the agency’s details and a dispute route. The FCRA article sets it out in full.

Alaska adds no state adverse-action notice for a criminal-history report and no state pre-request notice. The federal sequence is the whole of the procedural requirement. What Alaska adds instead is an access rule that changes what a report can contain and therefore what a letter can fairly rest on: AS 12.62.160(b)(8) withholds nonconviction information and correctional treatment information from the general release, so a repository-based Alaska report reaching an employer is a conviction and current-offender report rather than a full history.

The purpose limitation belongs in the file. AS 12.62.160(c)(5) provides that "information released under this section may be used only for the purpose or activity for which the information was released", and (c)(4) requires the releasing agency to record the recipient, the date, the nature of the information and "the statutory authority that permits the release" and to keep those records for at least three years. A record obtained for one requisition and reused to screen the same person for a different role, or carried into a later hiring cycle, is being used outside the purpose it was released for.

Where a national check is involved the employer may never have seen the underlying entry. The Department of Public Safety states that national criminal history record information "may be released only to government agencies", and offers a private requester the alternative of supplying "a specific list of disqualifying criteria for the position you are seeking to fill", in which case the bureau reviews the record and "will let you know if a given record subject's record contains disqualifying information". A determination of that kind has to be describable to the person, because the pre-adverse action notice must be capable of being disputed, and a bare statement that a criterion was met is not.

A set-aside does not remove the entry, and a letter should not say that it did. AS 12.55.085(e) lets a court set aside a conviction on discharge without imposition of sentence, but AS 12.62.900(19)(B) places information that a conviction "has been reversed, vacated, set aside, or been the subject of executive clemency" inside "past conviction information", and (13)(D) places it inside "current offender information". The record therefore carries both the conviction and the set-aside, and the set-aside is itself reportable information rather than an instruction to disregard what came before it.

Where a sealed record is at issue, the subject holds a statement right. AS 12.62.180(d) provides that a person about whom information is sealed under the section "may deny the existence of the information and of an arrest, charge, conviction, or sentence shown in the information". Sealing is administrative, it is granted on a written request to the head of the agency maintaining the record, and it reaches only information that "beyond a reasonable doubt, resulted from mistaken identity or false accusation", so a denial of that kind is a signal about how the record arose.

Two Alaska provisions affect what a letter may say about a drug test. AS 23.10.660 makes test results a confidential and privileged communication disclosable only to the tested person or their written designee, to employer designees who receive and evaluate results or hear the explanation, or as ordered by a court or governmental agency, so a result may not be circulated more widely than that in the course of a decision. AS 23.10.640(d) provides that an employer "may not rely on a positive drug test unless the confirmatory drug test results have been reviewed by a licensed physician or doctor of osteopathy", so a decision resting on an unconfirmed screen is resting on something the chapter does not permit an employer to rely on even where the employer has opted into the chapter.

Screening in Alaska: what your process needs

• Read AS 12.62.160(b) before assuming a state repository check is available on request. It is a closed list of ten routes and a consumer reporting agency acting for an employer is named on none of them. The only route a screening firm can use is (b)(8).
• Expect a narrower report than a court search would produce. AS 12.62.160(b)(8) permits release "to a person for any purpose" and then withholds nonconviction information and correctional treatment information. Under AS 12.62.900(18) that removes arrests not prosecuted, dismissed charges, acquittals and undisposed matters, each after a one-year lapse.
• Do not widen the read for a general employer by analogy to the interested-person route. AS 12.62.160(b)(9) and AS 12.62.900(17) turn on the position rather than the sector: it is the supervisory or disciplinary power over a minor or dependent adult that opens the route, and the route carries the two withheld categories with it.
• Establish identity the way the department requires. AS 12.62.160(c)(3) bars release until identity is established "by fingerprint comparison or another reliable means of identification approved by the department", and the department states the practical form as written permission or fingerprints. A request without a signed authorization on file is a request the section does not authorize.
• Keep the purpose on the record. AS 12.62.160(c)(5) confines use to the purpose the information was released for, and (c)(4) requires the releasing agency to log the recipient, date, nature and statutory authority for three years. Do not reuse a repository record across requisitions or hiring cycles.
• Do not promise an employer a national check it cannot receive. The Department of Public Safety states that national criminal history record information "may be released only to government agencies". The private routes are a willing government agency recipient or a criteria-based determination by the bureau.
• Price the search correctly. State fees stated by the department are $20 name-based, $35 fingerprint-based state, and $47 fingerprint-based state and national. The department recommends the fingerprint route because name-based searches may miss records reported under aliases or other names, which is a quality argument rather than a cost one.
• Do not cite a ban-the-box rule for Alaska. None was located. AS 18.80.220(a)(1) enumerates race, religion, color, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sex, marital status, changes in marital status, pregnancy and parenthood, and criminal record is not among them.
• Do not treat a medical cannabis card as a protected status here. AS 17.37.040(d) provides that "Nothing in this chapter requires any accommodation of any medical use of marijuana (1) in any place of employment". The provision forecloses an accommodation claim in the workplace rather than creating one.
• Do not extend anything to adult use either. AS 17.38.220(a) preserves the ability of employers to have policies restricting employee marijuana use, and (d) preserves a property holder's right to prohibit use on the property.
• If a drug test is part of the process, read AS 23.10.615 first. "Compliance with AS 23.10.600 - 23.10.699 by employers is voluntary", so the chapter's conditions and its immunity are two sides of one bargain: adopt the written policy, wait the thirty days and confirm the positive result, and the immunity at AS 23.10.600 and AS 23.10.610 is available.
• Do not rely on an unconfirmed screen. AS 23.10.640(d) requires confirmation "by use of a different analytical process than was used in the initial drug screen", requires gas chromatography mass spectrometry, and provides that "An employer may not rely on a positive drug test unless the confirmatory drug test results have been reviewed by a licensed physician or doctor of osteopathy".
• Keep test results inside the permitted circle. AS 23.10.660 makes them a confidential and privileged communication, disclosable to the tested person or their written designee, to employer designees who receive and evaluate results or hear the explanation, or as ordered by a court or governmental agency.
• Do not ask for a polygraph. AS 23.10.037(a) bars requesting or requiring a lie-detecting examination of an employee or applicant, the definition of "person" at (c) includes the state and its political subdivisions, and a violation is a misdemeanor. The exception at (b) covers police officer positions only.
• Treat a set-aside as an entry and not a deletion. AS 12.55.085(e) lets a court set aside a conviction, but AS 12.62.900(19)(B) makes the set-aside part of "past conviction information" and AS 12.55.085(f)(3) still counts the conviction as a prior conviction for sentencing.
• Do not describe sealing as general relief. AS 12.62.180(b) is limited to information that "beyond a reasonable doubt, resulted from mistaken identity or false accusation", and even sealed information may still be provided for record management, criminal justice employment, review by the subject, research, imminent harm prevention or a use authorized by statute or court order.
• Scope a court search to the court location, not to a county. Alaska has no counties: article X, section 2 of its constitution vests "All local government powers ... in boroughs and cities", and section 3 provides that "The entire State shall be divided into boroughs, organized or unorganized". Its trial courts sit in four judicial districts and its directory lists 40 locations.
• Check which index answered. Alaska publishes a trial court case search and an appellate case search separately, the trial courts being the superior and district courts and the appellate courts being the supreme court and court of appeals, so a single search will not have covered both.
• Ask before you assume on salary history and automated decision tools. Neither was found, and neither was verified as absent.

Related states

• Washington. Washington cut its salary threshold to $20,000, which reaches effectively every job in the state, and bars juvenile records outright for anyone 21 or older, while still allowing arrest records on the same clock as convictions.
• Oregon. Oregon releases criminal history to employers and screening firms only through a name-based search that the state police must label as unconfirmed, so the match rests on similarity of names and description rather than on fingerprints, the answer covers Oregon alone, and it returns every conviction with no time limit plus arrests less than a year old that ended in no acquittal or dismissal. Every request is disclosed to the person it is about before anything is released, and the department delivers fourteen days after sending that notice.
• Montana. Montana caps criminal record reporting at seven years and the cap reaches convictions, with no salary exemption anywhere in the statute and no exceptions subsection at all, so an old conviction is not reportable here at any salary. It also names marijuana in its off-duty lawful-product protection, and it splits the state’s criminal record into a restricted stream and an unrestricted one in which the courts sit.

What we do

Alaska's screening law is an access rule before it is anything else. The central repository is the Criminal Records and Identification Bureau at the Department of Public Safety, and AS 12.62.160(b) is a closed list of ten routes into it. A consumer reporting agency acting for an employer is named on none of them and reaches the repository only through (b)(8), which releases "to a person for any purpose" and withholds nonconviction information and correctional treatment information in the same sentence. Identity is settled by fingerprint or by a department-approved alternative, which the department administers as the subject's signed authorization, and the released information "may be used only for the purpose or activity for which the information was released". The national check goes to government agencies only. The employer who will give the worker power over a minor or dependent adult gets the widest read in the state, including the two categories withheld from everyone else. No ban-the-box rule was located, Alaska has no state consumer reporting act, and there is no cannabis protection in either program: the medical chapter expressly refuses any accommodation "in any place of employment" and the adult-use chapter preserves employer policies. The set-aside at AS 12.55.085 does not clear a record, because AS 12.62.900(19)(B) reports the set-aside as part of the conviction history. Alaska has no counties, so its courts sit in four judicial districts with two trial levels and a search routes by court location. Our Alaska work reads the repository route before it orders anything, keeps the purpose of each release on file, and does not promise a national check a private employer cannot receive. If a current vendor treats Alaska as a full-history state check or runs it county by county, this is where that shows.

Sources

• AS 12.62.160, Release and use of criminal justice information; fees, the ten release routes including (b)(8) and (b)(9) and the conditions at (c)
• AS 12.62.170 and AS 12.62.180, correction and sealing of criminal justice information, including the mistaken-identity ground at (b) and the denial right at (d)
• AS 12.62.400, national criminal history record checks, the closed list of purposes for which fingerprints may be submitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation
• AS 12.62.900, definitions, including "interested person" at (17), "nonconviction information" at (18) and "past conviction information" at (19)
• AS 12.55.085, Suspending imposition of sentence, including the set-aside at (e) and the prior-conviction rule at (f)(3)
• AS 17.38.220, Employers, driving, minors, and control of property, the adult-use employment provision
• AS 17.37.040, Restrictions on medical use of marijuana, including the refusal of any workplace accommodation at (d)
• AS 18.80.220, Unlawful employment practices, the enumerated grounds at (a)(1) and the application-form rule at (a)(3)
• AS 23.10.037, Lie-detector tests, the prohibition and the police-officer exception
• AS 23.10.600 to 23.10.699, drug and alcohol testing, including the employer immunity at AS 23.10.600, the voluntary-compliance provision at AS 23.10.615, the policy contents at AS 23.10.620, the collection rule at AS 23.10.630, the confirmatory test at AS 23.10.640 and the confidentiality rule at AS 23.10.660
• AS 45.48.100 to 45.48.290, the personal information security freeze subchapter, including the criminal-record-file exemption at AS 45.48.210(a)(10)(A)
• AS 45.48.400 to 45.48.990, the Social Security number subchapter, including the employment and background-check carve-outs at AS 45.48.410(b)(5) and AS 45.48.430(6)
• AS 39.25.160, Prohibitions generally, in the state personnel chapter
• Alaska Department of Public Safety, Criminal Records and Identification Bureau, Background Checks, the source for the "any person" and "interested person" report lists, the written-permission rule, the government-agency-only rule for national checks, and the fees
• Alaska Court System, Court System Information, read through the Internet Archive capture of courts.alaska.gov/main/ctinfo.htm, the source for the two appellate courts, the two trial levels, the four judicial districts and the judge counts
• Alaska Court System, Court Directory, read through the Internet Archive, the source for the 40 trial court locations grouped under the four judicial districts
• Alaska Court System, Search Court Cases, read through the Internet Archive capture 20170419190038, the source for the split between the trial court index and the appellate index
• Alaska Constitution, article I, section 22, Right of Privacy, read through the Lieutenant Governor's constitution pages as captured on 3 December 2010
• Alaska Constitution, article X, Local Government, including the borough provisions at sections 2, 3 and 6, read through the Lieutenant Governor's constitution pages as captured on 3 December 2010
• Route note: every Alaska statute on this page was read live from the Legislature's print endpoint, basis/statutes.asp?media=print&secStart=&secEnd=, which is the form that returns text; the same endpoint returns HTTP 200 with a byte-identical 14,930-byte fallback shell for a path it does not understand, so a capture that looks successful may be empty. courts.alaska.gov did not answer from this environment on either scheme (curl exit 000, roughly 21 seconds) and every court quotation was read through Internet Archive raw replay with timestamps from the CDX API; the real path is main/ctinfo.htm rather than the root. law.alaska.gov and www.commerce.alaska.gov return HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare body, ecode360.com returns HTTP 403 for the Anchorage municipal code at every path tried, and ltgov.alaska.gov returns HTTP 405 to direct requests. www.dps.alaska.gov was reachable live and is the source for the repository's stated practice. The full-text statute search on www.akleg.gov could not be made to return results, so no search over the Alaska Statutes was available and every negative on this page is a finding about the instruments read in full. No Alaska case law was read and the r.jina.ai reader proxy returns a Cloudflare interstitial for these hosts.

Last reviewed 23 September 2026. This page is checked on a quarterly cycle, because state screening law changes every legislative session. Nothing here is legal advice; see the terms of use.