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.
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.