Professional License Lawyer in North Carolina

FAQ #5 Is My Employer in North Carolina Required by My Licensing Board or Agency to Report Me if There is an Investigation Against Me at Work?

FAQ #5 Is My Employer in North Carolina Required by My Licensing Board or Agency to Report Me if There is an Investigation Against Me at Work?

Is my employer in North Carolina required by my licensing board or agency to report me if there is an investigation at work against me? An investigation at work would obviously be related to performance, possible ethics violation, or things of that nature. However, whether they report you is Board or Agency specific. Your employer may be a licensed entity themselves, as a lot of facilities are. If that is the case, they are probably going to report you to cover their liability and make sure that they themselves do not get into issues with their licensing entity for their facility.
As far as requirements are concerned and using the Board of Nursing for example, if there is a hospital that believes that a licensee has done something wrong, the Board of Nursing has a complaint evaluation tool (CET) that is on their website. It is basically a score sheet to determine whether or not the facility should report them to the Board or not. This is what hospitals go by when they do reporting. Now, are these facilities licensed by the Board of Nursing? No, they are not. They are licensed by state entities, so they are not necessarily required to report. However, if something were to happen, they are going to use this CET to determine reporting eligibility. If we are talking about a different profession’s score sheet, they are going to count things up, determine whether it’s reportable or not, and then act accordingly. If something is super egregious and they feel like it might open them to civil liability, more than likely they will report the licensee as well. So as far as requirements are concerned, unless the facility is licensed by that Board or Agency, then they might not be required by that Board or Agency to report it, like the hospital, for example. Hospitals are not licensed by the Medical Board or the Nursing Board. They are licensed by a different government entity under the Department of Health and Human Services, so the Board is not going to have authority to go after them.
However, if your profession is something like a general contractor or an engineer and you work for a GC company or an engineering company, then there are going to be mandatory reporting requirements there because each professional has to report when they know another professional in their industry is doing something they should not be doing. So if it is a situation like that where you are working for an engineer or an engineering firm, you do something wrong, and the employer finds out about it and does an investigation, then they are going to report you over to the engineering board if they feel like something has gone wrong.

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