11 ms·

I checked earlier today and yep, my employer is selling my data and future earnings potential to the company that is infamous for poor data security. A confoun

I checked earlier today and yep, my employer is selling my data and future earnings potential to the company that is infamous for poor data security. A confounding factor is that as a hiring manager, and at least for all the hiring decisions I have been involved in, I know we did not use this to check candidates. So what's the upside? EDIT: ADP Workforcenow appears to do this automatically. I'm curious to find out if anyone in our company even knows it is happening. I will find out soon enough, as this is definitely a hill to die on.

anyfactor 5y ago
Equifax is the Dow Jones Chemical of the data world. They have a tendency to mess up catastrophically yet they keep surviving by some miracle!
ecf 5y ago
We had some schmuck HR consultant come in to a startup I was previously working for and their primary job duty was implementing ADP. Glad to know they chose a product that involuntarily sold out my HR information.
Cerium 5y ago
Ask HR how you should verify your employment and salary for a mortgage application. I know my company intentionally shares since they ask you to use the work number to send a verification to the lender.
- BeefySwain 5y ago
  Great idea!
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Yeah, I used the work number thing to verify my salary for my mortgage.
  - hypothesis 5y ago
    As in you had to interact directly with work number for that? Or do you mean that lender “magically” knew and pre-populated your salary info during application process?
    - newtwilly 5y ago
      Not the parent, but my lender magically knew with just my name, position, company, and SSN. FWIW
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      No, I contacted my work to get my ‘work number’, and then gave that to my mortgage lender.
- dboreham 5y ago
  The whole "verify your salary with employer" process is BS. Lenders can verify income by requesting your tax returns, and N recent pay stubs (source: I own my employer and have verified income this way, since obviously they are not going to call myself up and ask me to verify my own income). This is only about reducing their verification costs. If there needs to be a giant database of everyone's income, the government should run it, and they already have the data.
  - MichaelBurge 5y ago
    If you verify with tax returns, it would be easy to borrow money from a friend and count it as income every year just for loan qualification. And then borrow more money from a bank, wait 6 months for seasoning, and use it as down payment to buy real estate. And if the loan gets sold to the government, it needs to meet government underwriting criteria and the lender has no free will. Especially for residential mortgages: No private business cares about 3% interest on a loan, they sell those to the government and make money on the origination fees. If you get a hard money loan, they'll only ask for tax stubs but you'll also pay 10-12% interest. If the buy is really good sometimes they don't even care about taxes or ability to repay - they get your equity if you default so who cares if you make a dumb decision? It's mainly the government loans where they really try to avoid defaults.
    - nixgeek 5y ago
      10-12% is higher than my credit card APR is that really what hard money loans are going for now?!
      - lupire 5y ago
        The US average is a above 16%.
    - Thorrez 5y ago
      >If you verify with tax returns, it would be easy to borrow money from a friend and count it as income every year just for loan qualification. Huh? Isn't it fraud to declare something as income that's not actually income? Also, if you declare something as income, don't you have to pay tax on it? So this scheme will mean you have to pay a bunch of taxes you wouldn't have to otherwise. This sounds like the opposite type of fraud people do. People usually under-report income, not over-report it. "Yes IRS, I made $1T last year." "Ok cool, send us $400B in taxes please."
tomrod 5y ago
I worked in a two person company last year where I ran payroll with ADP. It's there for me too, and I don't recall opt in permission on this.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Three-person company here. We do our own payroll, using Quickbooks (not their payroll processing service, just Quickbooks the desktop application). We have employees in two states.
  - throwoutway 5y ago
    But is your salary data on this equifax site?
  - getcrunk 5y ago
    Is your info listed?
- arwhatever 5y ago
  "Do you agree to allow your data to be shared with 3rd parties as necessary to provide you with the best service possible?" [races off to something much worse than you imagined with your data]
- dlubarov 5y ago
  Just to add another data point, our startup uses Gusto and my salary isn't in the data. My old salary from Google (which I think used ADP) is though.
lumost 5y ago
you know, I spoke with a company not too long ago and they gave me an offer that was 30% lower than what I currently make. The gap was entirely due to not accounting for public company RSU grants (that I had already mentioned) In hindsight I wouldn't be surprised if their department used this tool to check my current cash income and automatically generated an offer. I wouldn't trust this data for much, and I can almost guarantee that someone in HR/Finance thinks their clever for using it.
- BeefySwain 5y ago
  The report tells you in the last 24 months who has looked at this info, so you could check that.
  - bloomburger 5y ago
    what report? where?
  - notimetorelax 5y ago
    OMG, those companies… They should monetize tracking the tracker. And then they can monetize that.
Traster 5y ago
I've seen how this works before, and what happens is all the companies submit their data to equifax, equifax then goes and creates a set of "profiles" for example "Junior software engineer", take all the data for employees with software engineer related titles and less than 3 years of experience, remove outliers and sell the result to employers as "salary band information". The result is that your employer gets a number saying "Junior software engineers in X location earn from 80,000 to 110,000" and that's used by your HR team to ensure that you don't drive up salaries by over offering. The role of equifax in this is to act as a level of protection, because the actual resultant behaviour is all the software companies working as a cartel to limit employee wages.
- m_ke 5y ago
  Pave (https://www.pave.com/ https://www.pave.com/) is another startup doing this
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. . . We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

anyfactor 5y ago

Equifax is the Dow Jones Chemical of the data world. They have a tendency to mess up catastrophically yet they keep surviving by some miracle!

ecf 5y ago

We had some schmuck HR consultant come in to a startup I was previously working for and their primary job duty was implementing ADP. Glad to know they chose a product that involuntarily sold out my HR information.

Cerium 5y ago

Ask HR how you should verify your employment and salary for a mortgage application. I know my company intentionally shares since they ask you to use the work number to send a verification to the lender.

BeefySwain 5y ago
Great idea!
cortesoft 5y ago
Yeah, I used the work number thing to verify my salary for my mortgage.
- hypothesis 5y ago
  As in you had to interact directly with work number for that? Or do you mean that lender “magically” knew and pre-populated your salary info during application process?
  - newtwilly 5y ago
    Not the parent, but my lender magically knew with just my name, position, company, and SSN. FWIW
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    No, I contacted my work to get my ‘work number’, and then gave that to my mortgage lender.
dboreham 5y ago
The whole "verify your salary with employer" process is BS. Lenders can verify income by requesting your tax returns, and N recent pay stubs (source: I own my employer and have verified income this way, since obviously they are not going to call myself up and ask me to verify my own income). This is only about reducing their verification costs. If there needs to be a giant database of everyone's income, the government should run it, and they already have the data.
- MichaelBurge 5y ago
  If you verify with tax returns, it would be easy to borrow money from a friend and count it as income every year just for loan qualification. And then borrow more money from a bank, wait 6 months for seasoning, and use it as down payment to buy real estate. And if the loan gets sold to the government, it needs to meet government underwriting criteria and the lender has no free will. Especially for residential mortgages: No private business cares about 3% interest on a loan, they sell those to the government and make money on the origination fees. If you get a hard money loan, they'll only ask for tax stubs but you'll also pay 10-12% interest. If the buy is really good sometimes they don't even care about taxes or ability to repay - they get your equity if you default so who cares if you make a dumb decision? It's mainly the government loans where they really try to avoid defaults.
  - nixgeek 5y ago
    10-12% is higher than my credit card APR is that really what hard money loans are going for now?!
    - lupire 5y ago
      The US average is a above 16%.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    >If you verify with tax returns, it would be easy to borrow money from a friend and count it as income every year just for loan qualification. Huh? Isn't it fraud to declare something as income that's not actually income? Also, if you declare something as income, don't you have to pay tax on it? So this scheme will mean you have to pay a bunch of taxes you wouldn't have to otherwise. This sounds like the opposite type of fraud people do. People usually under-report income, not over-report it. "Yes IRS, I made $1T last year." "Ok cool, send us $400B in taxes please."

tomrod 5y ago

I worked in a two person company last year where I ran payroll with ADP. It's there for me too, and I don't recall opt in permission on this.

dboreham 5y ago
Three-person company here. We do our own payroll, using Quickbooks (not their payroll processing service, just Quickbooks the desktop application). We have employees in two states.
- throwoutway 5y ago
  But is your salary data on this equifax site?
- getcrunk 5y ago
  Is your info listed?
arwhatever 5y ago
"Do you agree to allow your data to be shared with 3rd parties as necessary to provide you with the best service possible?" [races off to something much worse than you imagined with your data]
dlubarov 5y ago
Just to add another data point, our startup uses Gusto and my salary isn't in the data. My old salary from Google (which I think used ADP) is though.

lumost 5y ago

you know, I spoke with a company not too long ago and they gave me an offer that was 30% lower than what I currently make. The gap was entirely due to not accounting for public company RSU grants (that I had already mentioned) In hindsight I wouldn't be surprised if their department used this tool to check my current cash income and automatically generated an offer. I wouldn't trust this data for much, and I can almost guarantee that someone in HR/Finance thinks their clever for using it.

BeefySwain 5y ago
The report tells you in the last 24 months who has looked at this info, so you could check that.
- bloomburger 5y ago
  what report? where?
- notimetorelax 5y ago
  OMG, those companies… They should monetize tracking the tracker. And then they can monetize that.

Traster 5y ago

I've seen how this works before, and what happens is all the companies submit their data to equifax, equifax then goes and creates a set of "profiles" for example "Junior software engineer", take all the data for employees with software engineer related titles and less than 3 years of experience, remove outliers and sell the result to employers as "salary band information". The result is that your employer gets a number saying "Junior software engineers in X location earn from 80,000 to 110,000" and that's used by your HR team to ensure that you don't drive up salaries by over offering. The role of equifax in this is to act as a level of protection, because the actual resultant behaviour is all the software companies working as a cartel to limit employee wages.

m_ke 5y ago
Pave (https://www.pave.com/ https://www.pave.com/) is another startup doing this
mumblemumble 5y ago
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. . . We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]