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Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

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Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#131
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to. Your employer can give this info to whoever they want, and many give this data to Equifax or one of the other credit agencies. Also, you might give your bank employment details, and your bank will most likely send that info to a credit agency as well. There's not much of an escape.

Opt out of the system as soon as you possibly can. No mortgage, no bank, no address, no traditional job.

Or, combine with other people to fight the ridiculous system? Even if you manage to pull off a life like this, you're limiting yourself significantly and leaving many people behind.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 governmen…

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 mortgag…

10-12% is higher than my credit card APR is that really what hard money loans are going for now?!

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they pulled salary info after making an offer, then this is likely qualified as verification of data that prospective employee submitted. They can probably revoke that offer if one provided misleading info during application.

That's some shady behavior though. The whole point of the law is to prevent companies from penalizing employees based on prior salaries. Wouldn't be surprising if Google was finding excuses to retract offers based on seeing that they "overbid" on someone's comp. If anyone has had suspicious stuff like this happen, it sounds like it'd make a great lawsuit. Would be nice if some journalist(s) made a big stink out of Go…

The scenario I had in mind would pertain to California where they aren’t allowed to ask your salary history. So if one didn’t not disclose salary info, then offer was likely not based on that info (nor on work number info). In which case they can’t pull offer due to misleading salary info. However, all bets are likely off in states with no such protection…

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#136

Very interesting, I didn't expect the accuracy and detail in this data. All of my pay from Intel, Google, Facebook is in here. Qualcomm apparently did not report. Also, Google (my latest employer) pulled the data just before I started working, after giving me an offer. My credit card company pulls the data every month, sometimes 2-3 times per month. Several mortgage originators have also pulled the data even though I…

Does the data contain start and end dates for each employer?

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#137
Note that QuickBooks will now contribute to this data unless an employer explicitly opts out. I had to bring it to my employer's attention when they first rolled it out. Most small businesses that use QuickBooks won't have heard of it and will be contributing salary data by default.

https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-artic...

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#138

If this is correct, then it would be risky for someone to lie to a new employer about their former salary in order to receive an offer for a higher pay, because the new employer could use this service to cross check the employee's claims.

You don't need to lie. There's nothing wrong with saying "My current salary is $xxxxx, but I feel that my employer undervalues my skills so I want $yyyyyy. It's why I'm leaving my current role." There is no reason why your future salary has to be based on your current salary. If the employer you're negotiating with disagrees then walking away is the best option because they undervalue your skills too.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#140
post #9

"To log in, enter your SSN, date of birth, home address, and" No way, no how.

I dutifully entered everything they asked for, because, you know, they're Equifax and they undoubtedly have it already. Then they said I needed a "verification code" and gave me the option of half a dozen phone numbers and email addresses to choose from... none of which remotely resembled anything I've ever had (the email addresses all contained my surname and appeared to be randomly generated).

When I clicked the "none of these work for me" link at the bottom, I was presented with:

"Sorry, We are unable to log you in.

Your account is temporarily disabled. Accounts may be disabled when you attempt to log in with incorrect information or fail to complete a security challenge."

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