They do - I'm not sure how they licence it though or what data sources they use but I've seen that their data on high income households is the best in the business and shockingly accurate.
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.
They (The work Number/Equifax) don't license it at all. Company's pay for the privilege in fact. It's sold as outsourcing the "costly" HR task of providing salary data themselves. Other companys or individuals then pay Equifax $35 to make a single enquiry or subscribe at a monthly rate.
Users include 82% of all F500 companies and they have 225 employment records.
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.
I'm not sure how they licence it though or what data sources
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.
This makes me wonder. My employer has some customer data. We're very careful about not just letting any random employee access it without careful permission, auditing, logging, etc. Customer privacy is important to us.
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?
I believe it's quid pro quo. Equifax sells analytics services to corporations, and presumably you get a nice discount if you enter into an agreement to give them your information.
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.
There is nothing wrong with HR having that information. It's only illegal to base hiring/firing decisions on protected information, it's not illegal to have it.
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.
Why would a resource department need information from payroll? They aren't the bosses of the employees so it's not like they are making the ultimate hiring decisions.
In your company that may be the case. Some (many, especially public) companies use HR as the initial resume filter. They are supposed to make sure the resume is accurate, the applicant didn't lie about job titles, dates of employment, education, etc, and sometimes the dreaded keyword scanning. Some places they'll also do the initial phone screen to make sure the applicant can form more-or-less coherent sentences. Then they give the person hiring a stack of screened resumes, and that person then does the interviews for the actual position in question.
And I have worked at places where HR could unilaterally veto a given employee based on certain criteria (education, background check, etc).
In the US, those are protected categories about which a prospective employer may not inquire. This point was explicitly called out and repeatedly reiterated in the training I received a few years back about how to participate in an interview from that side of the table.
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.
Unless the protected characteristic is in some material way relevant to the role, asking such questions is likely to contravene the law or laws establishing the protection. It's not a criminal act, but it is unlawful; to do so, without a very clear and compelling argument for why it's relevant to the candidate's ability to perform the job, places the organization at the mercy of any candidate who cares to file a claim.
This is false, it is generally not illegal to ask about protected characteristics, it's only illegal to use them in hiring decisions. The distinction is important.
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.
Fair. I sort of assumed from "don't even think about doing this unless you have signoff from general counsel in writing" that it was the latter, but on further research, I am indeed finding the former is more accurate to fact.
> In the US, those are protected categories about which a prospective employer may not inquire
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.)
I doubt most employers would go for that, but I suppose it's possible. More importantly, though, it'd also be much harder than getting it from a payroll provider.
According to wiki they have 225 million employment records and according to The Work Number they are used by 82% of Fortune 500 employers.
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.
Prepare to be even more shocked. Here is a 'sample' of the EDR report you can request from The Work Number containing all the information that they have on you and may or may not be giving out (or selling to the highest bidder):
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"'
Proving my income (with paystubs or a W2) separately from the credit report the bank ran always gave me the impression that the credit agencies didn't have that info. Nor do I ever recall seeing it in the reports I got from them.
Not a lawyer, but for major credit lines lenders would generally want to see a few pay stubs and even tax returns, so seems like they’re using the data from the application form as a ballpark figure anyways.
FFS, that's called "fraud." Providing false information on a credit application is a criminal offense. Are you going to go to jail for it? Probably not, as long as you pay your bills. But it's 100% fraud and illegal and you can go to jail for it and people have.
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.
I wouldn't call that an aspirational income, though — would you? That's just your real household income. It's also not an option for most adults, who are almost all older than 18.
A million or more 18-20 year olds could no doubt truthfully report 6-figure household income. To me, that's "many".
(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.)
That's actually an interesting stat. If there are ~115 million US households and 20% have > $100,000 income, that is ~23 million households. If 18-24 year olds make up ~9.5% of the population, and we 'assume' they are evenly distributed in these households, then this statement (well 18-24) could be true.
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")
No you can't. The CARD Act of 2009 explicitly forbids this. You can't include anyone else's income if you are under 21.
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.
You'll be in a lot of trouble if you ever default and provided "aspirational" income, or at least that is the impression I get from the text that accompanies such inquiries.
>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.
Yeah, at one place I worked they were able to use that to determine whether people were qualified for means-tested aid in seconds. Which obviously made things faster but it gives you pause to know it's so easy to find out.
Shouldn't this be handled by a government agency? It seems awfully risky to have unaccountable companies trade your sensitive information around for profit.
Some of this stuff is handled by the government, such as your driving record (which includes accidents and tickets). You can obtains a copy of yours from your state's DMV.
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.
The reason the government doesn't do that is talented people don't want to work for them. Virtually all the government jobs are union and pay is primarily based on time served. You'd be getting third rate talent at best.
I don't think that's the real reason, to be honest. More like some combination of anti-hiring ideology and a handful of people getting rich off the process. The British government did it with, apparently, real success. And are government contractors really much better places to work?
//edit: Well shit, TIL: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/equifax-breach-fallout-y...