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If a potential employer decides not to hire you based on a credit report, they are required to notify you of that fact and the fact that you have a right to get
by jstalin 13y ago
If a potential employer decides not to hire you based on a credit report, they are required to notify you of that fact and the fact that you have a right to get a copy of your credit report.
This sounds like a juicy area to start suing employers that don't follow the law.
https://www.emplscreen.com/Notice1.pdf https://www.emplscreen.com/Notice1.pdf
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gwern 13y ago> This sounds like a juicy area to start suing employers that don't follow the law. How do you establish an employer didn't hire you because an HR person saw your credit report and didn't like it?
- kabdib 13y agoSee if they pulled the report. They could go through an intermediary, but you could make that unlawful (the current credit agencies are one step just above "hearsay" anyway) and aggressively enforce it. Not that it would happen.
- gwern 13y agoWould that be sufficient for a court of law, that merely the company ordering it is sufficient to incriminate them?
- eldavido 13y agoIt's very gray. I was just talking to a friend who works on Capital One's funds availability policies, and with complicated multi-factor models, it's difficult to discern whether the credit report was really the factor that led to adverse action.
- tzs 13y agoThere was some discussion of this in Professor Abu-Mostafa's "Learning from Data" class at Caltech. You can use machine learning techniques to build systems that are very good at saying whether or not you should give someone credit. If your system say no, though, you have to tell the applicant why credit was denied. The banks are pretty sure that they can't get away with just saying "well, this big black box that we got some Caltech professor to build for us looked at all our prior customers and decided you are too similar to the bad ones". They need to say something specific. I wonder if one could approach this by fiddling the inputs and rerunning the check, trying to find a reasonable minimal tweak that would produce approval. Then report those tweaked parameters as being the reason for credit denial. For example, if you deny a car loan, run the check again with higher income, and if you find that this gets an approval, report that the loan was denied because their income was too low. I asked about this on the class forums, and Abu-Mostafa said it was interesting, but he didn't know if it would satisfy the legal requirements.
- lightcatcher 13y agoThere are (simpler) models you can use that allow you to explain how the system makes decisions. Namely, the naive Bayes classifier makes it extremely clear how much each component of the input vector affected the classifier output.