If this isn't a serious violation of your privacy I don't know what is.
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/exclusive-your-employer-ma...
I had to call Equifax, spent 1.5 hours on the phone with multiple confused reps until I found someone who could change my record. I thought there would be some kind of validation process, but nope they just asked me where I worked and how much I made.
It is such a broken system. I'm dumbfounded that Equifax hasn't been sued out of existence.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/equifax-breach-congress-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/equifax-data-breach-was-entirel...
Fat chance. I'm sure many people would take the $50 McD gift card in a heartbeat.
You're more likely to get 2-3 months of some sort of their protection service that will be "value-equivalent" to $50, not anything tangible or liquid in value.
Never purchased anything with them since I saw that.
Imagine for a moment that your current employer is paying you significantly less than the market value for your role based on your skills and experience, and attempts to request a review of your compensation have been rejected. You may then consider looking for work elsewhere. It’s likely that the question of your current salary will come up at some point during the interview process with a potential employer.
What would you do in this situation? On the one hand, if you’re honest about how much you currently earn, the potential new employer may be reluctant to offer a significantly higher wage… even if it is the “market value”. On the other hand, if you exaggerate your current salary to reflect a figure that’s on-par with what you should be earning, you risk getting caught in a lie when that employer screens you using The Work Number. Clearly, neither situation is ideal.
This is why places like California and NYC have made this question illegal. Candidates can still volunteer this information if they want, and employers can verify it in that case.
But, as another commenter already said, there are ways people can learn to deflect that question toward what they're looking for instead of what they're already making. Recruiters usually accept this after a certain amount of pushback, though not always.
Then they can ask for my current salary but I have largely invalidated the question.
I was once being paid way below market, and while I couldn't get a substantial raise, I eventually got a promise of a market salary in the near future. So I immediately started interviewing outside the company and told them about my promised salary when they asked what I was making.
Deflecting the question this way did work to get me hired at a more reasonable amount, without being dishonest according to my conscience. However, things rapidly soured, and it's possible they checked what my salary had been and never asked me to clarify, so I may have outsmarted myself.
Beyond the difficulty of opt-out, you have to send them more info (including your SSN, a copy of a government ID, and a proof of address that they offer can include your W-2 or paystub).
If only Equifax were even 1% as diligent about avoiding data breaches as they are at making sure no one can maliciously opt you out of them sharing this data that no one wants shared.
You can also see which credit card issuers run an inquiry on The Work Number if you pull your file, but you don’t get any sort of notification and there’s no way to monitor it.
As an example, CA might use The Work Number to check if you are working in NV but not claiming or under reporting that income on your CA medicaid application.
In addition - some people don't file returns that they should.
In addition - sometimes their are crazy backlogs govt / IRS side (transcript services have been very off and on, 35 million paper filed returns still pending processing).
Work number does pay day to pay day updates, so is current to within a few days usually.
The original purpose of the interstate commerce clause was to ban state and local governments from collecting sales taxes on transactions cross state lines, so that states had to compete to keep excise taxes as low as possible, and rely more on direct land taxes on property owners instead. This was because Madison and many of the other early federalists and democratic-republicans were influenced by the Physiocratic school of economics which thought there should be no internal taxes on trade and labor, that all internal taxes should be direct taxes on land.
So if state and local payroll taxes and the work number system are the new rakeoff allowing state and local governments to fund property tax cuts for the rich, it would make sense for federal government to continue its grand historical tradition of using the interstate commerce to suppress this nonsense, in order to encourage any states with broken property tax systems that are struggling to raise revenue to appoint commissioners to redo their assessments instead, in order to discourage state and local governments from taking the easy way out and imposing regressive taxes on workers with the least leverage to complain.
The issue is more about privacy rules. Local governments have to compartmentalize data and avoid impermissible use. They often buy data from third parties because the data isn’t “infected” with IRS compliance rules.
Luckily - in some cases you can send folks to go talk to someone at a child support agency or they do part of eligibility screening - but many of those folks never come back because they get gobbled up by the hassle factor over there (already disorganized / not stable in their situations).
I've become convinced that some of the eligibility screening hoopjumping is just to save money by making it damn difficult to get through the paperwork - even if you are actually poor (which is often obvious). I remember when some programs went to QUARTERLY eligibility verification on services delivered quarterly - so every visit practically was a re-screen on eligibility (the overhead of this is monumental).
So the desire / demand for private solutions to all this is there for sure. Some folks just do front-ends for systems like IRS transcript requests!