There is a database holding more than 823 million employment records. Your paycheck may be feeding it.
Many payroll systems send employee salary and employment data to an outside repository every time payroll runs. From there, companies you have never dealt with can pull your record, and you may not receive real-time notice when they do.
Record count per Equifax's own published figures for The Work Number.
Ask your employer where your data goesYou signed paperwork once. The system may still be using it.
The feed
Many employers' payroll systems send employment and income data to an outside repository. The largest, The Work Number, receives data from employers' payroll systems each time payroll runs, by Equifax's own description.
The pull
Lenders, landlords, debt collectors, and others with a legally permissible purpose can request your record. The authorization doing the work may be a signature from paperwork you filled out days, weeks, or months ago. You gave them permission to ask. The system can treat it as permission to keep asking.
The blind spot
You may not receive real-time notice when your record is accessed. When you order your own report, you can see who pulled your data for the last 24 months, per The Work Number's consumer FAQ. The repository holds your history longer than it shows you who has been looking at it.
Don't take our word for it.
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Ask your employer. Many of them don't know either.
In many companies the feed was switched on as a default inside a payroll product, not decided in a meeting anyone remembers. One question starts the conversation. We wrote it for you.
Hi,
I recently learned that many employers' payroll systems send employee salary and employment data to outside verification repositories, in many cases through a default setting in the payroll product. I'd like to ask two things:
1. Does our payroll system send my employment or income data to a repository like The Work Number?
2. If it does, would we consider an option that asks for my consent at the time of each request instead?
Thanks for looking into this.
Want to check your own record first?
You can order your Employment Data Report from The Work Number at no cost and see who has accessed your record over the last 24 months, per its consumer FAQ. You can also request a freeze at no cost. Know that a freeze blocks many verifiers at once, including the ones you want, like the lender on your mortgage or the landlord on the apartment you're trying to get. It is a blunt instrument, not per-request control.
Employment verification itself serves a real purpose. Lenders need it, landlords need it, employers need it. The question this page raises is not whether verification should happen. It is whether it should happen out of a standing pile, or with your knowledge, at the time of request.
I spent 30 years running one of the largest independent background check companies in the country, and when we verified employment through The Work Number, we pulled records by Social Security number. I built MyEmployment so the answer to every request comes from the person the record describes, at the time of request. That's the whole idea.