Ask HN: How does my bank not know my income? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does my bank not know my income?

6 pointsVoodooJuJu4 comments

I received an email from one of my credit card providers asking me to update my income. My first question is: in this modern world where data sharing and collecting seems ubiquitous and cheap, how do they not know this? Don't things like the Equifax Work Number [1] collect that data?

This prompts a more interesting question: How much longer until all of my personal information of this sort becomes accessible to anyone who wants it? What will we lose when it does?

[1] https://theworknumber.com/

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There are many different types of income. While wages, salary, and general compensation for services (called "earnings") are often the main sources of income for individuals, they aren't the only sources. There's also interest, regular dividends, rental income, distributions from pensions or retirement accounts, and Social Security benefits. Equifax collets this data with the cooperation of employers.

Equifax also relies on employers to report data to them, so if your employer doesn't, then the existence of the Work Number is irrelevant. In the era of ubiquitous side gigs where people get paid as contingency workers rather than wages or salaries by the company, you run into issues relying on the Work Number, even before factoring in all the other types of income.

How does the government not know your income? I'd say that's more surprising (ignoring that neither institution would know about cash income or some deliberately concealed income which it sounds isn't relevant).

I've been getting regular spam from a credit card company to update my income as well. They probably just want another point of confirmation, or it's just a simple case of the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.

They probably have a very good idea.

That being said I suspect this could be a mechanism to "verify" or confirm things are still accurate or current from what you last said it was.

Imagine you telling your CC company you make 250k a year to get a higher limit but only make 100k. Perhaps that credit card account has a large amount of cash flow due to expenses being refunded from an employer or something. A way to find that out could be to ask you to update what you make every so often hoping you'll do the "math" wrong.

If it's a CC company they might also just want to give you a higher credit limit - it's how they make money after all!

They want you to confirm the numbers they have so they can be more accurate. Your income may go well beyond w2 salary data, and they want to offer you products commensurate with your spend.

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