Reasons Companies Need to Have an Employee Drug Testing Policy

More and more companies are administering drug tests to employees and prospective employees. How and when these tests are administered is important. The results of these tests must be able to stand up before hearings for unemployment compensation, workers compensation claims, and lawsuits resulting from accusations of discrimination when terminating an employee. There are several excellent reasons that companies need an employee drug test policy.

For every drug test, people have devised ways to cheat it.

Drug test policies usually spell out the conditions that must be followed when administering the test. Normally, these are done with extremely tight controls in place. People have smuggled the urine from friends and family into the test to keep from getting caught. Because companies learned to see if the urine bottle felt warm, these fake samples would be worn under the clothes and inside the person's underwear. Having an employee go into the restroom with the person being tested reduces the chance of such cheating.

Employees are often required to sign a seal on the samples to indicate that it is their bodily fluid.

This prevents the tester from swapping the original sample with a tainted sample just to get the tested employee in trouble or fired. It also prevents the tested employee from claiming that it was not their urine that was tested. The same reasons apply when the policy requires that the sample be boxed and prepared for shipment to the lab while the employee watches the process.

Drug test policies are intended to give the right ways to determine who is to be tested for drugs.

Court cases have generally favored testing that is sufficiently random or situations where everyone in a department or company was tested at the same time. Laws are written to prevent companies from targeting unwanted employees and harassing them with excessive drug testing. A good drug test policy will provide a reasonable basis choosing when to administer these tests.

Having a drug test policy makes new employees aware from the beginning how they will be picked to be tested.

Entrapment is another danger when dealing with employee drug testing. Companies do not want employees to be able to claim that they were picked for testing because they called in sick or were acting a bit unusual. If the employee can prove that the company had targeted him or her in the hopes of catching them using drugs, it may lead to the company losing a lawsuit over the drug testing. While it may seem a little strange, you need to be able to prove that you caught the person by accident.