Alto found us from another state.
Their corporate headquarters is outside California, and nobody there had a relationship with a Live Scan provider in Los Angeles. They searched, they found us, and they called.
Taft Singletary, Director of Operations at Alto, on how the work was run:
What they described was not a fingerprinting appointment. It was a programme. They had rideshare drivers in California who needed to be registered with TrustLine, and that registration was what would ultimately clear those drivers to carry teenage passengers under Uber Teens.
That is a different problem from printing one person. Every driver is a separate submission. Drivers are not office staff who can be gathered in a conference room on a Tuesday — they are working, and every hour not driving is an hour not earning.
The Work Happened Where the Drivers Already Were
We went to the garages.
Not to a corporate office with a conference table and air conditioning — to working garages, some of them with extremely hot, dark, loud and cramped conditions a lot of providers would simply decline. That is where the drivers were, so that is where the mobile fingerprinting had to happen.
We stayed on site for the duration of every session. Not a drop-in, not equipment left with a coordinator. None of that is improvised either — what a large onsite session needs from the client’s side, from the right form to a point person to the billing number, we have set out separately in how large mobile fingerprinting events actually work.
Hundreds, Starting or Ending their Shift, Every One a Separate Submission
Across the programme we fingerprinted hundreds and ultimately thousands of drivers.
Picture the actual scene: hundreds of people, roughly twenty in process at any moment, every one of them waiting to get back into a car and start earning again (or finish and go home). And every person in that line is a separate Live Scan submission that has to be identity-verified, entered accurately, captured at sufficient print quality, reviewed, and transmitted to the Department of Justice. One transposed digit and that driver is coming back another day.
We scanned drivers’ licences rather than typing them. Reading the barcode pulls the applicant’s information directly instead of a technician keying it in under time pressure with a line waiting. At that scale it is not a convenience. Manual entry is both the slowest step and the one that produces the errors nobody discovers until results fail to come back weeks later.
In the garages we were holding about five minutes per driver. A prepared applicant anywhere takes five to ten, so five is the fast end of normal — and five minutes is not the hard part. The hard part is holding it across hundreds of people in a hot garage without the accuracy slipping, and having every one of those submissions reach the Department of Justice correctly.
It Was Not One Event. It Was More Than a Year.
There were multiple sessions, repeatedly, over more than a year.
Between them there were weekly meetings — online, with Alto management and staff across locations around the United States — planning the next round: who was coming, where, what each site needed, how to sequence it.
We were not a vendor who showed up on a date somebody else picked. We were part of how the programme was planned.
We Told Them What Was Not Working
Because we were in the garages and they were not, we could see things management could not.
We fed that back: where drivers were arriving unprepared, where the process was losing people, what was driving the failure rate for drivers entering a programme that was new to everyone, Alto included. Those conversations changed how the sessions were run and improved the success of the program.
A technician who only rolls prints cannot do that. You have to be in the room enough times to see the pattern.
How It Ended: We Helped Them Bring It In-House
After more than a year, the volume justified Alto running Live Scan themselves.
We helped them do it — the service provider, the software, the terminal, the Department of Justice side of it. The whole operation, set up so they could run it successfully without us.
Which meant they no longer needed us.
Nothing lasts forever, and helping a client reach that point is part of the job. We do a smaller version of it regularly: organisations that need help getting set up, getting through their initial Live Scans, and in some cases becoming a custodian of record.
Alto did not need that last part. Because the work was TrustLine submissions, they never had to become a custodian of record — they needed every other piece, and that is what we built with them.
Knowing which pieces a given programme actually requires is most of the value. Assembling all of them when only some are needed costs a company months.
If You Are the One Making This Call
If you are responsible for getting a roster of drivers, employees or contractors through Live Scan — whether that is a group booked into one session or an ongoing business requirement, and that roster is large, distributed or hard to pin down:
- Will they come to where the people already are, including places that are not comfortable?
- Can they hold throughput without stripping the accuracy out of the submission?
- Will they still be there for session eleven, a year in?
- Can they tell you what is going wrong in your process, or only report how many people they printed?
- Do they understand the pathway well enough to advise you when you outgrow them — and to set you up if you do?
What sits behind all five is whether a provider treats Live Scan as operating a scanner or as a chain of obligations. If your roster is licensed in more than one state, the answer changes again, because California Live Scan cannot cross state lines — that work is done on ink cards, as it is for gaming and casino licensing.
Tell us how many people, where they are, and what the requirement is. We will tell you what the sessions need to look like.
Call or text (310) 526-0200