Comment by atrettel
5 months ago
I have never heard of Pave before, but this just sounds like yet another copy of Equifax's "The Work Number" [1]. Basically, HR at many companies gives your salary and employment history data to Equifax, who then sells access to the information to certain parties with supposed need to access it, including potential and current employers and creditors. This report is likely one of the most invasive consumer files out there for many people.
I cannot comment on the legality of this kind of data sharing, but as I and others have pointed out, it has existed for a while. I do agree that it is concerning. You can freeze your Equifax The Work Number report at least, just like other credit reports.
I downloaded a personal report from the work number website and found to my horror that my employer was reporting every. single. paystub. gross and net, to equifax.
That felt like a huge breach of privacy. Given that equifax had already proven incompetent at keeping my data secure, I immediately sent HR a request to stop sending my supposedly 'confidential' pay info. They politely told me to kick rocks, so I went on TWN's website and froze that report so no one would be able to request it, and it will be a cold day in hell before I thaw it.
I am an investor in equifax. Let me clear up a misconception on where the data comes from. Half the data comes from large enterprise customers, who “sell” the data in exchange for Equifax doing I-9 verification for free. The other half comes from 39 payroll companies. Every single payroll company except for Rippling and Gusto sell paystub data to Euifax. (Rippling will start next year). Those are exclusive revenue share deals. You cannot be a competitive payroll provider without the revenue share from Equifax. So before you blame your employer, they might not be selling it directly and even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway.
Do you have a sense of why, according to you Gusto will remain the only company that doesn't sell payroll data to Equifax?
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Sounds like Gusto is the only acceptable option then. Thanks for the info!
> even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway
Surely that can't be legal?
As a Gusto admin for my company and user for another (well, my wife is the user), I am happy with our choice of payroll provider.
That's good to know. The company I work for currently uses Rippling; I will mention this upcoming change and suggest that we should consider switching to Gusto.
I hate the argument of "you cannot be a competitive company without being a scumbag."
It's a bad argument through and through.
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Can I opt out thru the payroll company?
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Maybe I'm missing something... If the data doesn't come from the employer, then how does the "payroll" company get it?
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You make an excellent argument here for tight regulation of the industry.
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Don't ever work in the public sector then. Your salary is public record, open to anyone who is curious enough to look.
I think that's widely understood and part of the job description of being a public servant. What's not widely understood is HR secretly selling your data while working at a private company.
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Public servants do not make enough money to be useful targets. The meaningful threat comes from large compensation tied to other asset information (tying an online person to that income, not difficult). You can buy lists of these already tied up and ready to download for your scheming pleasure. From English Rolex robbers to Florida kidnappers, they all enjoy the data.
I do not think it can be stopped, but the days when a wealthy person could safely live in a suburb and have the kids imagine that they are middle class is long gone. It is terrifying. The best thing for a wealthy discrete person to do is move to Singapore or Australia, or somewhere with a sufficiently low crime rate to feel comfortable, or get quality security, which sucks.
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The information available via the public record is not as detailed (typically annual salary)and not definitively tied to any person. The Work Number is tied to your SSN and is much more detailed than the public record (each paycheck and a breakdown of different compensation).
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Which is fine. The problem is the imbalance of information and therefore bargaining power between workers and employers. With this information salary negotiation is like playing poker with your cards open so only thing it does is depress wages.
That's not a problem for the public sector because both sides can see it and there is no real negotiation (you still save time/money by not having to go thought the interview process to figure out your potential compensation).
or live in Sweden (where your earnings as well as your address and property, car or pet ownership are public record)
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The problem is not public salary. In EU multiple countries have it public with noe issues to anyone. I'm outside of EU and also have my data public due to owning an LLC.
The problem is identity fraud, and evil corpos like equifax plus some weird laws facilitate it way too much on a giant scale. This is what's infuriating.
22 states currently have salary history bans. You can save the trouble of jumping through Equifax's hoops if you have that protection.
Many if not most companies outsource employment verification to The Work Number. When you get a new job, a frozen report will complicate your background check.
They don't give out salary info in employment checks though. AFAIK they require your explicit permission except for government agencies who use it to verify your eligibility for benefits. I would be surprised if they are not selling aggregate salary data though
If they want my info, they can ask me. I would rather them not have this info before an offer is made.
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> They politely told me to kick rocks
The only way this stops is when people return the favor (on the spot, without a notice period).
Yep. Equifax got hacked a few years ago and the Government let them use ITS credit monitoring tool for those affected instead of reaching into its own pockets to pay for a third-party solution.
#sad #speakingOfMonopolies
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I froze the report, and I also told my employer not to report anything to Equifax (which luckily my employer allows).
This made getting approved for a mortgage more difficult. These days, loan officers just expect to be able to hit a button and get all your info.
We're losing the privacy battle.
Loan officers typically want to see bank account balance, paystubs, and tax records.
unfreeze it just for that report. You can ask the bank, credit card, mortgage loaner which credit bureau they use and then unfreeze your account for 2 weeks.
The freeze is mostly ineffective for when you actually want it to work. From what I remember (even for the credit freezes) is that if you provide written consent to, say, a background check, then that overrides your freeze. So if you're applying for a job (basically the major instance where you'd want your salary information private) they're going to ask for your consent to do a background check and bingo they'll know how much money you make.
IMO this type of information should be illegal to sell or request.
I’m not sure this is true. The last time I changed jobs I had my TWN report frozen, and the background check company was really confused and said “we can’t seem to verify your job history through our normal means” without specifically saying why. I had to send some redacted paystubs.
With the passage of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act which was signed into law on May 24, 2018, security freezes do not apply to the making of a credit report for use in connection with "employment, tenant, or background screening purposes" (see Sec. 301(a)(4)(I) of the Act [page 34 of the PDF below]).
https://www.congress.gov/115/plaws/publ174/PLAW-115publ174.p...
To be fair, I'm not sure if the same rules apply to whatever type of "freeze" the work number offers. I'm not even entirely sure it's regulated at all.
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In case folks want to quickly know how to start a freeze, heres the info from the website:
To communicate a freeze request, send an email to the address below requesting a Freeze Placement Form: TWNFreeze@equifax.com
As a datapoint for how I've seen this used in the real world, I've spoken to startups who will defer to Pave regarding how much they'll offer to pay. The startup I spoke to said 'We pay you the 85th percentile for your YOE and role based on Pave data'.
Then I want 99th.
Considering the median tech startup employee is already above average, I think the 99th percentile, and above, really only belongs to literal, bonafide, geniuses…
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I just signed up to see what they have on me.
I love that they have ALL my personal info, but I can't create an account with a password longer than 16 characters.. Why the heck are they not storing the hash?
Great security.
Pave is a company that has been snapping up other existing companies that performed this kind of aggregation of compensation data. Basically companies look at this benchmarking data to figure out what they should pay for different jobs and levels. Just some extent companies genuinely need this kind of data to figure out what to do. But I also think it breaks supply and demand. Companies are not discovering price of labor but just using each other’s signals to decide what to pay collectively
https://www.pave.com/blog-posts/announcing-paves-series-c-an...
These services feel not dissimilar to the Realpagr case that is ongoing now with rent price fixing.
How does this ultimately not end up having a depressing impact on salaries?
It does depress salaries, which is the point.
This thread got pretty off track. But, if I were to opt out of this database and went looking for a job, would potential employers not be able to see specific history about me (or at least not from Equifax)?
“I’m an employee looking for my data”. Links to https://employees.theworknumber.com/
Spits out 403 error forbidden
Gosh, that’s awful.
If one is required to sign an agreement to a background check, could this supersede one’s freezing of one’s Work Number?
In my experience the background check company (Hireright IIRC) was not able to complete the check “normally” with my TWN report frozen. Had to send redacted paystubs.