Originally Posted by
Flyincop
For those of you with arrest records and no convictions, contact the local prosecutor's office where the charge was made. There will be an expungement system in place to take the arrest off of your record. Several forms to fill out and hoops to jump, but, its a perfectly legal way to clean up your record and give you some peace of mind.
Note: Various federal agencies take "snapshots" of all state/local records and store them for intelligence, security, and background check purposes. You can safely assume that they will never expunge anything from those records since they are not accessible to the general public or most employers.
An expungement does not guarantee that it will never show up on a federal check.
Legally, an expungement means that the incident is removed from that jurisdiction's records, or sealed from public access. It does not mean the event never occurred. A state law regarding expungement does not apply to the federal government.