12 November 2017

Equifax sells your salary history

As reported by NBC News:
The Equifax credit reporting agency, with the aid of thousands of human resource departments around the country, has assembled what may be the most powerful and thorough private database of Americans’ personal information ever created, containing 190 million employment and salary records covering more than one-third of U.S. adults.

Some of the information in the little-known database, created through an Equifax-owned company called The Work Number, is sold to debt collectors, financial service companies and other entities...

But salary information is also for sale by Equifax through The Work Number. Its database is so detailed that it contains week-by-week paystub information dating back years for many individuals, as well as other kinds of human resources-related information, such as health care provider, whether someone has dental insurance and if they’ve ever filed an unemployment claim...

How does Equifax obtain this sensitive and secret information? With the willing aid of thousands of U.S. businesses, including many of the Fortune 500. Government agencies -- representing 85 percent of the federal civilian population, including workers at the Department of Defense, according to Equifax -- and schools also work with The Work Number..
That was from an article published in 2013.  I naively assumed that the situation might have changed by now.   Nope.  CNN writes "Why Equifax will continue to profit by selling your personal information":
"But it's not in the interest of lenders to stop sharing information with the credit rating agencies, Horn said. It could hurt the accuracy of the credit reports they buy back."

2 comments:

  1. It's also in a company's interest to know how much you were making at your last job...so they don't "overpay" you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I work at a financial institution. The real reason we want to report your debts to the credit agencies, especially if you're delinquent, is it's one more lever that may hopefully convince you to pay your debt. In fact, we often require applicants with large collection items to pay those off before we will lend to them (or open checking accounts for them).

    ReplyDelete

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