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Comment by huebnerob | Hacker News Reader

1. I've only ever given my SSN to a company in the same packet of information that contained my signed offer letter, so we'd be far past negotiations at that point. If you're worried about them going back and verifying what you said you made, well, you shouldn't be lying about that anyway.

2. I'd hope that people might hesitate a little bit before committing acts of identity fraud on an institutional scale.

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1 - It depends on the company. I've had some companies ask for my SSN when visiting for an on-site interview, and others that don't ask for it until I've signed an offer.

2 - Will it save the company more money than the potential cost of lawsuits? Is it provably fraud? I'd argue that there is value in knowing for certain that an applicant made $x amount of total compensation in salary, benefits and equity. Having a precise dollar amount could let you implement all sorts of ways to optimize the compensation packages you offer for different employees.

For instance you could check an applicants past three jobs and get the average compensation % increase between each. You could use this to get a well-modeled idea of the minimum you need to offer them based on past trends in order to hire them.

Is this illegal? It should be, but the job market didn't anticipate the Equifax breach. There may not be laws that specifically prohibit this.

> If you're worried about them going back and verifying what you said you made, well, you shouldn't be lying about that anyway.

I get why it's important to tell the truth to e.g. a lender during a mortgage application.

Why should a prospective employer deserve this information?

Paychecks don't always correlate to other compensation considerations, such as stock options, extra vacation, higher 401k match, higher health insurance contribution, etc, that are often negotiated.

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