Police certificates are often needed for immigration, work or child adoption reasons. In many immigration cases, authorities require police certificates from every country where person lived for more than 6 months since the age of 16. For work reasons, requirements may be less encompassing. Certain countries may even require police certificates based search conducted using full sets of fingerprints. You are advised to inquire in advance about the exact format of the police certificate needed for your purposes.
FBI Police Certificates
In most international cases, originals of the FBI Criminal History Summary Checks (commonly referred to as "FBI Police Certificates") are required with the apostille or legalization. You can get one using the link https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/identity-history-summary-checks from FBI directly or from private FBI-approved Channelers.
Nevertheless, please note that the FBI-approved Channelers may not provide an apostille. A request for your FBI Identification Record must be submitted directly to the FBI if an apostille is needed. FBI background check certificate is a Federal document and can be authenticated or apostilled only by US Department State!
Criminal Justice Information Services of the FBI (CJIS Division) will authenticate the Police Certificate by placing the FBI Seal and the signature of a division official on the results (if requested at the time of submission). Documents prepared in this way may then be sent to the U.S. Department of State by the requestor to obtain an apostille if necessary or authentication for subsequent legalization at a foreign embassy/consulate/mission (for use in countries that are not parties to The Hague Apostille Convention).
State Police Certificates
Please note that sometimes the organizations that require your Police Certificates may not accept FBI Police Certificate (not meeting their requirements) or specify that that additional State Police Certificates may be necessary for deeper coverage. They may even refuse to accept Police Certificates directly from you because of fears of altering the records. Furthermore, FBI Police Certificates may lack state-level police data about your history.
For example, if you need Police Certificate for U.S. Government employment or licensing within the U.S., U.S. Federal laws and/or state statutes require submission of your request through your state identification bureau (state police), the requesting federal agency, or another authorized channeling agency.
The list of state identification bureaus can be found via link https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/identity-history-summary-checks/state-maintained-records-listing
You should contact the organization requiring your Police Certificates for the correct procedures to follow.
How to Use Our Services
Unfortunately, we cannot obtain Police Certificates on your behalf. However, we will be very happy to assist you with our U.S. Department of State authentication and consular legalization services in Washington, DC.
It is super-easy to use our services if you follow the below suggested algorithm of actions:
- You contact us preferably by email explaining your document situation. If it is urgent, you can call us 24/7. Please provide as many details as possible about your documents but the key information we usually need is: 1) who issued them, 2) where you intend to use them, 3) how many you have, 4) are they originals or notarized copies, 5) how fast you need them back and 6) the destination they need to be sent to. If your shipment destination (after processing) is neither in the USA nor in Canada, then we would need the exact address including postal code so that we can give you exact courier quote.
- We will reply by email as well as fast as we can with our comments, suggestions, questions and/or confirmation with preliminary or final quote.
- You can then write us back with additional questions, comments or concerns. Or you may just be satisfied and ready to send your documents.
- At this stage we agree on the course of action and our services. You would make the payment, ship the documents and email us the tracking # so that we can start tracking your inbound shipment and provide you interim updates.
- We will complete your service request and ship the documents back to your agreed destination either in your attached prepaid envelope with filled out air waybill or in our envelope (but we would have to charge you extra for this service). If you prefer, we can scan the completed documents and email them to you prior outbound shipment so you would know that we did indeed do everything as previously discussed.
- After shipment is sent, we will email you the tracking # so that you can monitor the arrival.
We hope to hear from you soon!
