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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

How can anyone say it’s accurate?

Employers provide it. Obviously they could report incorrectly, but it's not like Equifax is just guessing.

Would you be willing to torpedo a good candidate making a reasonable request for compensation based on a discrepancy on this site?

And if you were, I suspect you are doing the candidate a favor.

a favor? how so

Would I personally? No. But then I would not ask the requisite question of "what was your prior salary" in the first place.

Fact of the matter is that this tool makes it trivial for medium and large employers to suppress wages.

You could start your own co. and raise your salary to the sky, this can be gamed. But then, why would you even be an employee.

However, for the average worker, this is awful

Wouldn't you still need to be a paying Equifax customer to supply that?

Say you were to increase your salary to 500k/y, you work in a lucrative industry for example, I think Equifax charges less than 5k upfront for whatever suite of services they're offering, and if I understood correctly, to gain entry into the service, you simply have to add data into the database.

There's a way to break Equifax, but they're expecting people not to have the balls/time to do it, and I think they're right. You can't expect your average mom of two that works at Walmart to figure this stuff out, it's a tilted playing field.

Silver lining is that I don't see any RSU compensation listed in my report! That's the biggest chunk of my earnings anyway, so that should be fair game during negotiations.

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