However, I can't imagine the compliance nightmare that would exist around a process that lets HR people look up people's equifax information. If they get a full report, it could contain information about disabilities, national origin, ethnicity, religion, and enough information to construct knowledge about sexual orientation.
However, all that information is pretty worthless for most decisions. Aside from it being illegal to use that information for hiring decisions (in most situations), the equifax stuff isn't super accurate. I've looked myself up and it gets a lot of information wrong, most other people I know who have looked themselves up in have also found major inaccuracies.
Users include 82% of all F500 companies and they have 225 employment records.
My company uses it :(
http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/30/16762661-exclusi...
This is a pretty shocking news article regarding the last time Eqifax was in the news about this a few years ago. At that time (like now) they were selling the data to all kinds of companies.
“Developer employee cheatsheet: WTF is Salary Benchmarking?“
https://codeformore.com/developer-employee-cheatsheet-wtf-sa...
You give permission to your employer to query those sorts of databases when agreeing to a "background check" as a condition of being hired.
Ever filled out a credit card application? Most of them ask for your current salary. This is before the credit check is done.
My guess is the credit card companies are passing that information back.
Of course, any time I put my salary in one of those applications it's correct in a range of $50K+. If they have those numbers, they are really inaccurate.
At Equifax, though, information about random people isn't customer data. It's the product. They give it to anyone who asks for money. Do they have any motivation to say J random employee can't just look up everybody's data? Why? Letting you have free access to what they charge everyone else for would just be a perk, right?
Likewise for credit scores--why else would a lender report data to Equifax if Equifax wasn't purchasing that data, either directly or as part of a larger contractual arrangement.
It violates FCRA at the very least.
Obviously it gets really tricky to prove someone did or did not use protected information in their hiring/firing decision, so it's clearly safest for HR to avoid having any of that.
And I have worked at places where HR could unilaterally veto a given employee based on certain criteria (education, background check, etc).
Usually the data is reported by the employer themselves.
You can query the employment data without querying the full Equifax report.
Don't employers already get most of that from doing in person interviews? Even through phone screens you can gather most of that information.
Some of that information can be obvious, as in the case of visible disability and occasionally ethnicity. But it's not permissible to inquire in any case. And speaking from the side of the interviewee, such questions would immediately bring the interview to a not overly friendly close, both because the answers are none of any prospective employer's business, and because no company so insensate to liability concerns is likely destined to end up anywhere I care to go.
The reason people avoid asking (and tell others to avoid the same) is to avoid accusations or the appearance of using that sort of information in their hiring decision. You really have no defense if you ask about ethnicity and then decide not to hire that person, it's logical that you were asking about ethnicity because you wanted to use that information in your decision.
"Don't ask don't tell" is a good policy.
Once you actually have the job it's STILL just as illegal to use this information in promotions/firing decisions. However, it comes up in casual conversation all the time. People don't fret about asking a subordinate where they were born in casual conversation.
No, they aren't. First, it's questionable whether sexual orientation is a federally protected axis of discrimination, and, second, it's illegal to discriminate on protected axes (except where they are bona fide qualifications, or some other exception to the general rule exists), not to enquire on them (HR will generally avoid enquiry not necessary for a clearly legal purpose to mitigate the risk that that will be viewed as evidence of discrimination, not because it is illegal in and of itself.)
Employment credit checks are perfectly legal.
Then they turn around and sell all that data while telling the participating companies what a wonderful service they are providing them by offloading this task from traditional HR.
It's crazy.
https://www.theworknumber.com/samples/The-Work-Number-Employ...
As you can see its much more than 'just' your salary. It includes (amongst other things):
Union Affiliation; Salary breakdown (Base, OT, Commission, Bonus); Dates of pay increases; Medical Insurance (coverage, Policy #, Provider name, Annual cost); Any Workers Comp claims; Breakdown of your paycheck (401k contribution, taxes payed, garnishments, etc)
Just imagine the national outrage if some employer was shown to be directly selling this information to someone about their own employees. Yet a third party is doing just that and many companies are complicit. It is absolutely outrageous!
'hmmm maybe I don't want to hire Joe Shmo, after all he did join a union in the past. He might try to unionize our plant'
'looks like Joe also has some garnishments, doesn't sound like someone we want on our team. Probably has a troubled past.'
'well looks like Joe made 70k last year, but a lot of that was from working OT. I think we can get away with offering him 60k and promising him a lot of OT "opportunities"'
Welp.
Well, you certainly don't have to give your "real" income. Aspirational income is fine.
But (on credit card applications) I've always put a 6-figure income in when asked. Even as a college student with an income of $0.
Also, your accounts would be closed if they found out that you lied on your application. American Express, in particular, is known to conduct financial reviews and shut down accounts who can't prove their income.
Do you have a source for this? Or can you define "many" some more?
(Slightly over a quarter of households in the US have a household income over $100K as reported on tax returns. Household income for the purposes of credit application can be meaningfully higher than for adjusted gross income tax return concerns.)
it's 26.3% of households with incomes over $100K. I saw another estimate of 125 million households, so it could well be ~33 million households with >=$100K household income.
(I'm not so much quibbling with numbers as trying to get across that "it's a lot of people")
Even after you're 21 you're supposed to only include someone else's income if you have access to it. If your parents don't give you a stipend then you aren't supposed to include their income.
>ROCHESTER, NY—U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul, Jr. announced today that David P. Gaylord, 51, of Rochester, New York, pleaded guilty to bank loan application fraud before the U.S. District Judge Charles J. Siragusa. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison a fine of $1,000,000.
>Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany H. Lee, who is handling the case, stated that in 2006, while residing in the Western District of New York, the defendant submitted various credit card applications to Advanta Corp., Bank of America, and Family First Federal Credit Union. Gaylord knowingly provided false information regarding his income in order to obtain lines of credit from the banks and credit union. The defendant indicated that his income was anywhere between $90,000 to $122,000 when, in 2006, he reported to the Internal Revenue Service that his income was approximately $12,488. Gaylord ended up leaving outstanding balances on the various lines of credit and filed for bankruptcy.
They aren't totally unaccountable, there is some regulation, notably the Fair Credit Reporting Act, as well as other laws that regulate data brokers.
Americans, in general, are much more comfortable with private for-profit industries handling these sorts of matters over governments.
Anyways, there's absolutely no laws that salaries should be kept secret, your employer can post that information anywhere it wants. In fact, government employees salaries are expressly public information. The reason why employers limit access to salary data is because it keeps salaries lower, it gives them an upper hand in salary negotiations due to information asymmetry. That's why the salaries of professional athletes are public information, they have unions who make sure this information is available.
For me it's a good thing this information is available. I pay lower interest rates, lower insurance premiums, have more access to credit, have no trouble renting before I bought a house.
No instead they hire contractors for that purpose.
//edit: Well shit, TIL: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/equifax-breach-fallout-y...