Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Would this not be a big flag to reclassify these contractors as employees? Being able to have multiple clients is one of the factors to determine if you're a contractor...
Most contractors I know take on many clients.
Edit: I was under the impression being a contractor would give one flexibility to do whatever they want when they’re not billing hours, depends on the contract wording of course
1. Paying a business attorney in your state upfront for q&a is cheaper than paying them later when things go wrong.
2. Please don’t get your legal advice from HN.
But yeah. Call a lawyer… Preferably well before you need one in a hurry.
If you’re breaking zero laws, stop.
In probably 47 other states you could be fired for your activity outside of work even without a conflict of interest.
This. Also, as a contractor you can generally be let go with no reason and little notice (also depending on the contract).
Of course that cuts both ways; if you have multiple clients you can also jump ship quite easily.
One of criteria is right to subcontract and freedom to work with multiple clients.
If they get it wrong, they're liable for taxes, not the Contractor.
HMRC, the UK tax body is responsible for this, and therefore it is an utter mess in practice and has had chilling effects on the UK IT consulting market.
In general, though some people prefer to be contractors, these rules are in place because some employers try to classify de facto employees as contractors to avoid paying taxes or providing required benefits. Google, FB etc have complex contractor rules for their third party contractor agencies to steer clear of that and make sure they save on taxes and benefits.
Note that security guards can be structured as contractors despite obviously not being able to choose where or when they work. There's a big list of things that "weigh in favor" of one status or the other. There aren't definitive answers unless you've recently won a lawsuit against the government (which always wants employee status for everyone).
I'm the UK, a "contractor" is typically in business on their own account, applying for jobs directly to the end client.
In the US, it seems like a "contractor" frequently works for an outsourcing company. In the UK we'd typically call these people "temps" or "consultancy staff" depending on the source.
I think contractor is still used in that case in the UK sometimes too. The obvious example being construction firms.
I have worked on long contract - one or two years - for clients in the past helping them structure and put in place large projects and while I was technically there full time it was pretty clear that this was temporary, I was filling a punctual need the business wouldn’t have after and there was a somewhat clear idea of when we would part.
These relations are not necessary a way to pay less or not give benefits. I was actually paid a lot better than if I had been working there.
But taxes on dividends got higher and higher in recent years.
You can still work for years in the UK, accumulate money (or real estate / other investment) in the company - then you move to Dubai and withdraw dividends tax free.
You end up paying 19% corp tax rate on your income that you can access only after you're done with the UK - which is not great compared to lower taxed countries in Europe (Malta at 5% being the best), but you get access to the London only jobs which pay a bit more (even if now that's not really true in a post remote working world).
Definitely better than getting equivalent salary and being forced to stash money in a pension you'll see when you're 60 or pay 40% taxes
The customer gets a refund, but has to charge their own customer VAT on the full amount of the goods they are selling, so the VAT accumulates until it is paid by someone who cannot claim the VAT back
That's why it's called "value added tax" - each supplier in the chain generates VAT on the value they add.
Tell that to all the contractors that had HMRC tribunals pre reform.
not anymore
Of course, idea and execution are two very different things.
In NZ, it's often found in courier companies and telecommunications, where you're an owner-operator! Except you have to do what the company you work for says, when they say, and you have to provide all your own equipment, and of course, pay for your own sick leave, accident insurance and holiday pay. And no you can't work for a competitor, are you nuts?
At one point our tax department started cracking down on this, then stopped, I'm not sure why. But it needs to be done.
And let's not even discuss the infamous Hobbit law, where a right leaning government passed legislation under urgency to make all film industry employees contractors, with no rights to unionise, to keep Peter Jackson (he can get the Sir back when he redeems himself in my mind) and Warner Brothers happy after Jackson's Weta Studios lost an Employment Court case brought by a "contractor" who they very vigorously treated as an employee.
Around here (Poland) they tried to focus the crackdown on... contractors, planning on requiring a contractor to have at least 25% of their income from a second client to be considered self-employed and not an employee.
The local IT lobbyists had a hearty laugh about this idea and that was the end of it.
In UK (and Aus), this whole IT/dev contracting business is kind of win:win (govt. loses) though - devs like it because they get paid $$$ day rates and pay less tax, businesses like it because... capex vs opex(?).
So you see contractor job ads prominently listing "outside of IR35" as a benefit.
When this was implemented I know people who actually quit because they were told they would be within IR35 from then on, and they found new contracts outside of IR35.
In IT/tech people go the contracting route for the money so unsurprisingly they follow the money...
At least in the IT industry people legitimately had some freedoms. I was amused to learn that a lot of lorry drivers were operating as contractors outside IR35. Not even those driving their own vehicles. The driving regulations make it pretty difficult for one driver to do anything different from another driver.
I’m a contractor, and for many companies and recruiters it was a wink wink nudge nudge arrangement to keep a gravy train running. An element of that will return when the reform is scrapped.
> One of criteria is right to subcontract
It's not entirely true. Just because such right exists in the contract, does not mean it is valid. HMRC guidances have a ton of rules where it does not count. For instance if the business could use the sub-contractor directly.
> and freedom to work with multiple clients.
This is also irrelevant, because exclusive supply agreements is a normal business practice. Also people can hold multiple employments and that does not make them "contractors". People can also be contractors and employees at the same time and anything in between.
> If they get it wrong, they're liable for taxes, not the Contractor.
That's not entirely correct either. The client can claw the money back from the Contractor and very much every contract I have seen has clauses ensuring that any unpaid tax the client is liable for will be re-paid by the contractor.
You can only use the data for the purpose you originally stated, and this is not it.
Assuming, of course, that Truss does not repeal the repeal. It's not like she is known for doing screeching U-turns...
They could terminate them if they could show that the contractors were faking the hours.
A better remedy would be to fire the contract partner if you feel the work isn’t meeting the value you expect.
If you read the article and look at the differences, they fired the Equifax employees outright. They "flagged" a bunch of contractors. That almost certainly means they sent that list of contractors to their employer companies and requested additional verification of hours and/or requested they be removed from their projects.
If you are an actual employee of mine it's even more likely you are in breach.
No employment contract or agreement I've ever seen has prohibited someone from holding two W2 positions. Competing, sure. Sharing trade secrets is already illegal. Double-billing hours (e.g. on invoices or hourly work) is already illegal.
You're falling into a number of traps, not the least of which is thinking anyone who does contracting would ever agree to 50h/wk for a single client. "I'd be right more than I'd be wrong" is not sufficient justification to put additional requirements on a contract that almost certainly were not there to begin with.
This is very common misconception. People can have multiple employers just like contractors can have multiple clients. It has no bearing.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
> Services available to the market
Does not mean the business cannot have a one client at a time.
But it does mean that. If you aren't free to seek business opportunities, your services aren't available to the market. It's a factor, not the factor.
This is actually much more of an issue than someone just holding two W2 jobs, because these "contractors" are almost always billing hours, and if you're billing the same hour to two people that very quickly approaches actual fraud.
The catch however, is that this doesn't necessarily absolve Equifax of miscategorizing workers -- this was the subject of the famous Microsoft Permatemp lawsuit. It is possible for a W2 worker of a temping agency to also be considered a common law employee of the contracting corporation. In Vizcaino v Microsoft, the temps were found to be Microsoft employees -- even though they were also w2 employees of third party staffing agencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsof...
(Famously, this made Uber grant some rights to their drivers here.)
“Distracted” like the time that Equifax leaked hundreds of millions of pieces of personal data. Maybe instead of blaming the workforce they should worry about making the company a place that people want to work exclusively. Equifax does not matter at all as an organization.
I'm still astounded no one ended up in jail over that. Software Engineering really does need some professionalization.
Consequences is what it needs. We can no longer allow it to be profitable to be so brazenly irresponsible.
External selection pressure to kill off the maladaptive traits.
I'm struggling to understand what the point of this was.
You’d be surprised how incompetent an auditor can be if the security framework simply requires them to blindly fill in responses on boilerplate spreadsheets based on the department’s word alone.
For example, risk assessments are performed for all new applications requested by employees. InfoSec: Does this COTS web application have X security control which protects data in transit via encryption acceptable for use in our operating environment?
Some bozo from marketing: Yeah, I’m pretty sure.
In truth, neither of them are sure. The requester didn’t check, and the auditor saw the word “encryption” on the vendor’s website along with a green padlock in the address bar and that was good enough.
The auditor doesn’t even know how check the ciphers being used for this sketchy web application. The control also requires TLS 1.2+ due to the sensitive nature of the data. The auditor marks the security control as “Met” and approves the software request.
The auditor is completely incompetent, but is used as a pawn in an elaborate game of “security theater” to abstract away liability.
Also, even if the hypothetical security control in the example above wasn’t met, the head of marketing (System Owner) could request an exception be created to skip that security control.
Wait, qzx_pierri, you’re telling me that the security control can be skipped? How the hell is that a security CONTROL?
I don’t know, and that’s why I quit that depressing industry. To everyone reading this: Stay paranoid, and protect your data yourself if it’s on someone else’s server. "Security" (in America, at least) is often complete bullshit.
The person had no relevant degree (as is the case for most people working in security roles, because such degrees didn't exist until very recently).
The person did have a literal decades of relevant experience, working in security.
In this case they happen to be female.
That doesn't mean the criticism is motivated by gender.
Your gender also doesn't excuse you from criticism.
It's hard to get a formal degree on a subject which isn't taught anywhere!
For example: HN loves Mudge, who also happened to just leave a CISO post, and also only holds a music degree from Berkelee.
They were criticised too.
I guess we all see the world as we wish.
Compsci is not an infosec-related degree.
I'll agree the criticism isn't valid.
I disagree about the invalid criticism being gender biased or motivated.
The subject just happens to be female. That doesn't exempt them from valid or invalid criticism.
This isn't difficult really.
The vast majority of the people who invented, built, and maintain all the systems infosec people are deploying had CS or CE degrees. A good CS degree provides an excellent foundation for infosec careers. In fact, at many institutions, the infosec major is very similar to the CS major.
It's not everything you need, which is why a CISO should minimally also spend some time as an individual contributor in an infosec or closely adjacent group.
You're moving the goalposts because your position that CISOs need no education whatsoever in the work they are leading is prime facie absurd.
That's not to say that a CS graduate is or isn't the ideal candidate for the program (I think he felt that they were). But securing systems and organizations is primarily not a technical problem. You should understand that and understand the reasons why.
Sure, but the best security programs don't even exist in the same department as CS.
At CMU Information Security is run by the College of Engineering, not by the CS department.
At NYU Cybersecurity is run by Tandon school of Engineering, not by the CS department.
At RIT Computing Security is run by ... the Department of Computing Security.
At JHU Cybersecurity is run by Whiting School of Engineering, not by the CS department.
This is because computer science and computer security are two entirely different disciplines.
> It's a nasty sexist lie.
LMAO It is literally true.
It is also true AFAIK that when she got her first role as an executive in charge of security, she had no formal training or IC experience in security. All of her "security" experience was in executive roles. Which is insane. That never happens with other types of technical leadership roles (legal, law, finance, accounting, engineering, etc.).
Yes, but that's also true of almost all BigCo CISOs.
>It is also true AFAIK that when she got her first role as an executive in charge of security
By "AFAIK" you mean that this is just what you assume without checking, right?
Yes, we've been over this. The article is about Equifax. I made a comment about Equifax. I've previously criticized other execs after data breaches or other major technical failures (Eg Boeing).
> By "AFAIK" you mean that this is just what you assume without checking, right?
No, it means I did check and she does not according to any publicly available evidence. I added the AFAIK because I cannot personally certify that her publicly available resumes are complete.
It would be extremely odd to exclude relevant work experience from public profiles, so I strongly believe that she does not have relevant experience outside of exec positions (which she shouldn't have had in the first place without IC experience and/or relevant education). But I do not personally know her so I cannot personally attest that her public resumes are complete. Therefore, I added a qualifier.
I can understand why this wording confuses you, though. It's a result of the fact that I have personal integrity and take words and accusations seriously.
People who wield power over IC's but themselves have never been an IC are more willing to make decisions that harm others, but not themselves.
And this is the crux of the issue with the security industry. Too many of their decisions are made in a vacuum and everyone else has to deal with it.
Sounds to me like the execs just have control issues. "WE get to fly around in the private jets and strike business deals on the golf course, not you!"
Criminally negligent executives, in my personal opinion.
Execs hired incompetent (or maybe just "profit oriented") management and that incompetence trickled down to the bottom.
They are big enough it's totally normal that not everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
Not sure what the leak is telling you, it's not telling me too much
The difference here is that as an employee you commit to provide 40 hours of service to your employer. From the stories I’ve heard of these double jobs, this isn’t a weekend job working at the local coffee shop for an extra few bucks which doesn’t impact your primary responsibilities. Instead it’s a professional job with overlapping hours. Which means an employer isn’t getting what they paid for and these people are deceiving them.
Most CxO positions are full-time although there are, e.g. fractional CFO-type positions for smaller companies.
Idk the solution. It costs me $3,000 a month just for school. That’s a second mortgage.
Either they increase pay 50%. Which they don’t want to do. Or I work three jobs. If they don’t like it, pay more.
I actually don’t even have a choice, it isn’t even an option. School must get paid for. It isn’t a lifestyle expense. It is a necessity.
Sounds like student loans.
School athletics programs paying for huge multimillion dollar stadiums should not be possible. And on that topic, independent school districts should not exist. One state, one school district. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas)
This doesn’t sound any different from someone having no kids, not using the service, and expecting a refund.
I must pay for socialized education regardless if I use the service. I might choose to not use this service because I lack children or I may choose a different provider. But this doesn’t mean I don’t have to pay my taxes if I don’t want to use a gov service.
What makes adults with kids special that they don’t have to pay this tax when they don’t want to use the service?
I'm struggling to think of a single public service that you can get a refund if you don't use it. Even private services like health insurance don't refund you money because you chose a provider outside your network.
"We" also have not really decided anything as a society but were born into the decisions of prior generations and it could be changed. See Roe v Wade, marijuana, etc.
Also, if you are American, voluntarily donating money without oversight to a local school has as much return as breast cancer awareness.
And people I know went to many bad public schools.
That’s almost as much as the median home in America. So assuming you already live in the median home, you could send your kids to private school, or you could buy a house that’s twice as expensive.
Where I grew up, the median home is less than the national median, and the public schools are pretty good.
Since there's something like 100k public schools in the US, with very different performance and governments in charge, I don't think people here are really in a position to judge someone's parenting choices over the internets.
Also by the way, public universities run about 12k/year, so they may well have their children in public school.
A school being private doesn't magically make it great. It has to still work hard for that. A public school being good requires hard work too. But let's be honest, usually it boils down to parent involvement which is usually fueled by economic status. Rich(er) people have time and/or resources to actually be involved in their kids lives. They also tend to have fewer kids so more time/resources per kid. The initial thing a private school does these days is pool the rich(er) cohort of kids together.
I live in a part of my city known as the 'private school corridor' because there are so many. And, the public schools are notoriously horrible in the city's ISD. So, it's pretty much required if you have the means. The other alternative is to move to a suburb (different ISD), but even those are pretty easily seen as correlating good school districts with high home prices. Yet, I've seen studies in my area that say if everyone sent their private schooled kids to the public schools they would average out and be pretty well rated. But it's a first mover disadvantage to do so, so nobody does.
I also live in the south and this whole private school thing really started during integration, so there's that whole issue to contend with too. The impacts of red lining and white flight are pretty stark here. I don't think it's the motivating factor for most people any more, but inertia.
This is why our public schools have stats like "5% white" and "86% low income" on Great Schools. 5% white seems really low, the city is ~56% based on another google search.
More commonly, to pay other people to be involved.
Does he have some sort of generalized anxiety? Like it or not, an inability to take tests is going to negatively affect his life.
And I have no idea how much freedom Americans have to choose which public school to send their kids to.
By comparison, all Dutch schools receive the same funding, whether public or private, have roughly the same quality and are subject to the same standards, and people are mostly free to choose which school to send their kids to. (I think in Amsterdam, some primary schools have a certain postal code area from which they accept students, and for secondary schools there's a massive ranked lottery system where a small percentage of kids do not end up in one of their top-3 preferred schools.)
Sort of.
Per Wikipedia:
The largest source of funding for elementary and secondary education comes from state government aid, followed by local contributions (primarily property taxes)
As a side note, my city passed a $70 million dollar bond to build a new elementary and middle school. The school is currently ranked in the bottom 5% in the state.
Also:
Schools in the United States spend an average of $16,993 per pupil, which is the 7th-highest amount per pupil (after adjusting to local currency values) among the 37 other developed nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
$3,000 seems like a bargain by comparison.
And why do you think having a full-time tutor is cheaper than group care at a school?
As to why it's cheaper, that's a calculation they have to make. If the spouse's net income (looking at marginal tax rates) is greater than 3k a month, then it's not cheaper.
You seem to imply that “anyone” can be an effective teacher. That’s simply not true. Plus many children react much better to people outside the house. I was definitely that way. And my wife has many amazing qualities but she would make a horrendous teacher.
You pay for it with your taxes. It's a lifestyle choice if you want to send your kids to a private institution when public school is already covered.
I hope that doesn't come across as rude, because that's not my intention. But private school is not some necessity of life that you're forced to pay for -- definitely not "literally impossible" to survive without.
Yes, you could move, but as it turns out properties are more expensive in good school districts.
100% of the immigrants do that
I say that because yet, among my peers from that school, I count engineers, astrophysicists, doctors, IT workers, psychologists, pilots, and more.
So I would vigorously argue against the idea that students who attend underfunded public schools are at a disadvantage for life.
The biggest impact I noticed is home life and the involvement of parents. If you are a parent who cares and pushes your child, that is worth way more than the quality of the school as assigned by some ranking system.
Additionally, my exposure to a rough-and-tumble school with people of varying backgrounds (i.e., not a single socioeconomic stratum) gave me empathy and social skills that are extremely useful in everyday life.
I'm not saying your choices are wrong, but I strongly disagree with the premise that a less-than-ideal public school leads to lifelong negative consequences.
Agreed.
My comment is from experience as well though. A lot of my classes in HS had to be slowed down to the slowest student (no child left behind I guess), but the better students were frequently bored. I'm glad I was lucky enough to be able to take advanced classes, but I still think one's school has an impact. Exposure to certain topics or classes can certainly impact a student's life (in my opinion). For instance, high schools with a compsci class, I'm sure will have more students becoming SWEs than high schools without.
That seems so unlikely to be true I can't be bothered reading the rest of your comment.
A single example of a school spending program that has positive results would collapse your argument.
School funding is obviously dominantly important up to a point (they need books, rooms, teachers, etc.).
Past that point, marginally more engaged and educated parents are worth much more than a marginal $X of funding per student per year.
I went through a public school with a tri-modal distribution (that almost perfectly mirrored our county’s tri-modal income distribution). A handful of people dropped out functionally illiterate, most people came out “just fine” and went to a local community college or state school, and a handful of people went to top tier universities paid for by pell grants, scholarships and PLUS loans.
The main variable correlated to which modality you fell into was a combination of the socioeconomic status of your parents, and how engaged they were in your education (i.e. not going through a divorce, not rich but working 100 hours per week, etc.).
A passionate teacher or extracurricular sponsor (drama teacher, athletics coach) might have temporarily filled-in for or amplified this normally parental role for a year or two with a similar effect, but only for a couple students at a time. They would usually target their efforts on kids on the cusp of a modality (failing but with a lot of potential shown elsewhere, or very smart but from a troubled home).
There’s a study on kids that just barely missed the cutoff to get into the #1 public school in NYC. Their post-HS outcomes were indistinguishable from those on the symmetrical other side of the divide. On either side of the divide, you had parents encouraging and pushing their kids just as hard. Interpret from that what you will.
Basically, the world isn’t black and white. It’s damned complicated. Public school is complicated. Anybody who claims a simple solution, especially tied to funding or teachers, deserves suspicion IMO.
Are you serious? How did they manage to apply for and pay for the education needed to score those jobs?
A friend of mine was also a product of one of the shittiest public schools in her state, and she was apparently the only person in her grade to continue on to university.
Say you're two parents who are very conscientious about wanting your child to have "good outcomes" in life (i.e. have a good schooling experience, go to a good college, have a good job).
It is better, for your kids, for the family to live in an environment in which you (the parents!) are living comfortably and with minimal stress, than it is to attend a top 50 high school, (assuming that means trading off against comfort & stress).
By comfort/stress, I mean to say: money isn't a weekly, monthly, or even quarterly issue, jobs are low-stress, and you have a lot of spare energy/time to invest in your kids after school, on the weekends, and in the summer/holidays.
There are plenty of schools in the top 500 or top 1000 in the US that are in geographies check these box for you, your spouse, and your family, that don't cost $1000/month/child.
You might not be min-maxing your retirement accounts by taking jobs that allow you to work in-person/remotely there, but the compounding dividends paid by investing in your family and community carries much more value.
A "shitty" public school is probably generally underfunded, but at least has the decent-enough quality of teachers/parents to lead the motivated kids to the right information. That way those kids can go on in their own time and study enough to make it to professional jobs in the real world, although most of these kids will never make it to top-tier colleges due to optics of their schools.
A _shitty_ public school lacks even generally-caring teachers, and often suffers net-negative because of the parents. Kids in these schools grow up ignorant of what to learn, much less how to learn it.
Little Johnny is better than the plebs around them who attend the public school in their district.
The funny part is that school teaches you to do things "by the book" and that, itself, has its own downsides.
I can think of many scenarios where 1K/month/child is the best option. I don't know the quality of schools available in your area, but I do know it can vary wildly, and good school can make a huge difference.
And you have my deep respect for the sacrifice you are making for your children. We need more people like you.
In any major metro, an extra 2-3 bedrooms in a district with great schools is way more expensive than living in a place with the worst schools and paying tuition.
You can freeze your employment record with them here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/
I highly recommend you do this, as any employer could just decide to look you up using this info and you wouldn't be notified at all (unlike, say, a hard pull on your credit in a regular credit report).
If I started hunting for a new job now, I wouldn't take $current*1.05f, I'd go for $MARKET_RATE
That's the only number that really matters here when push comes to shove. It doesn't matter how good you are, no local companies are going to pay you $500k/year to act as an individual contributor in Idaho or Tokyo, because the market rate is ~$90k. On the plus side, if you get an offer for a principal FAANG engineer position in the SF Bay, you can negotiate up to $500ish even if your last job was paying $90k.
But why do employers and payroll processors give any data to Equifax? I can understand that credit card issuers, and mortgage and auto lenders want to know the credit worthiness of people they'll give credit to, and those types of businesses are likely required to share their own customers' info if they want to participate. But what benefit does the typical employer get by talking with Equifax at all? And why wouldn't an employer demand that their payroll processor not share anything with Equifax? (Their executives and founders presumably want some privacy for themselves.)
I'm going out on a limb here and try to guess the reason: Is it because typical employees want their employer to share the info so they'll be seen as having income and therefore it's easier for them to get credit cards and mortgages and auto loans? And if this is the reason, how did this situation arise; did some employees petition their company to share info? Or did the company think it was doing a favor for its employees by giving them an employment history on Equifax?
But you have to submit your data to get access to everyone else's.
The problematic nature of opt out is common sense at this point.
How many businesses today actually run payroll 100% in-house? Almost none.
It should have been liquidated and the proceeds split amongst the victims after that happened.
The general answer is that people are doing this because they feel undervalued. Sure there are some who will try to bend or even break the rules always if they feel they can get away with it, but for those whose output is a multiplier above normal, why should they donate that productivity to an employer who won’t pay for it?
Equifax is a horrible company overall, and this kind of monitoring is wrong. Their reaction to the facts isn’t necessarily wrong, though.
Merely feeling undervalued isn't enough to induce most people to work two full-time jobs. That's a brutal time commitment even for someone who isn't working very hard at either.
People usually do that because neither job pays well enough on its own.
In some cases they’ll outsource some work overseas.
Stuff is weird right now.
A full-stack dev with 7ish years of experience could easily create/maintain CRUD apps for a smaller company with minimal effort while focusing the rest of his efforts on a more challenging role at a larger company.
1. Is this legal in all jurisdictions an employee could conceivably be based in?
2. When will Equifax monetize this as a service to other companies (because you know they will).
Either employers haven’t caught on to that or the data it provides does not offer the required detail.
The company sells a product called Talent Report Employment Monitoring so other companies can keep tabs on potential moonlighting by their employees, too.
1. Does this have any external accountability or oversight?
Closest I see is being able view your report but first thing it asks for is an employer instead of asking for information for identifying an individual: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employment-data-report
Somewhere out there is an unemployed person being rejected from jobs or not getting interviews because this service is providing an incomplete or erroneous employment history. It’s critical that services like this have a means of both easily identifying and rectifying errors.
2. Equifax offers the option to delete or freeze your data but what does that mean for future employers looking to validate your employment?
Employers that lean too heavily on this are going to reject candidates that deleted or froze their data.
Employment history verification is something the government is in a good position to provide.
Relax, you can give them any employer you ever had, not just your current one. To get my record I put in a previous employer who doesn't even exist as a company anymore.
Not if they don't show up at all like mine. (Tried all four of my past jobs and none of them have shown up.)
>Step 2 • Log In First-time Users: If you do not have a user ID or password, you can call our Client Service Center at 866-604-6570 to request a copy of the report.
Further down the page you linked. Ill be calling tomorrow to learn what fresh hell equifax has created. For me.
Yeah, this was extremely frustrating. I'm trying to find my current and previous employer, and neither is even coming up on the search, so I can't verify my data.
I don't see why not. To my knowledge employment information isn't protected by law, and presumably whoever provided equifax that information turned it in willingly.
It doesn’t matter. For this to matter it would require punishing the offenders, and since they are wealthy it’s not really an option in most western countries.
Don't punish people for being entrepreneurial, it's completely un-American. If you can't tell whether someone is producing adequate value or not without interrogating their finances, that's on you.
What a conniving snake of an asshole. Can we abolish Equifax? Anyone have a link to the opt-out?
what does someone who doxes the general public for chump change deserve? I wonder what skeletons Mark Begor has in his closet..
This is a political / marketing move, as they could have also done the inspection without publicizing it.
Low performers were fired because they answered incoming calls poorly twice in a week.
So it IS possible top performers were allowed to have side gigs and not fired at Equifax.
This is an excuse. But, interestingly, it was an excuse for 2% of the people they investigated.
So apparently being a poor performer at Equifax, but NOT moonlighting, is not a fireable offense, since the other 98% weren't let go. Or they were, and this is just a propaganda piece in service to corporations (it is Business Insider after all). Either way, I feel, not exactly a great look for Equifax (like they have ever looked good), since either way it's still a waste of man hours spent to justify firing people they wanted to fire anyway.
America has a long history of owners doing everything in their power to control, literally or by proxy, their workers.
It also has a long history of making sure "those people"/workers/etc know their place and stay in it.
Call your state and federal legislative representatives.
(It does appear California residents might be able to have The Work Number delete their data: https://myprivacy.equifax.com/personal-info ; I’m not a California resident, so please report back if this works)
Edit: I qualified my first sentence because Equifax might just ignore your workplace data freeze and hand out your info anyway.
I'm guessing that's what people in this thread are looking for? Surely not everyone here asking how to freeze (or providing instructions on how they did it) works at Equifax.
Mailed, or emailed to: TWNFreeze@equifax.com
How skewed is the system when all the bad things of being a contract worker applies but any of the benefits are taken away? This is getting ridiculous.
As long as it doesn't affect their performance in their primary job and as they are not working at a direct competitor, it should be none of their stupid business (and should be illegal) to check for an employee's other jobs.
Except that having a second FULL-TIME job does affect the first one.
For instance, if an employee is working from home at two jobs at once, and makes an invention which they introduce in both jobs, then both companies might rely on this 'trade secret' to protect market share (including suing people whos 'steal' it. Some engineers are employed to come up with inventions, and if a business can't rely on their output to create competitive advantage then they are not providing the service they were hired for.
Similarly, a sales rep working for 2 businesses, or working in procurement at a government customer and sales at a vendor, could create a very nasty corruption lawsuit.
Finally, some jobs are responsive - for instance a site engineer or some cyber security roles. A lot of sitting around punctuated by sudden urgent work. I know a guy who repairs offshore wind turbines and he plays xbox all day then occasionally jumps in a helicopter and rides to the rescue. It would be a great job to do alongside another role, but if they company has chosen to pay you to be present in between assignments then they are very much paying you not to do that instead of just having you on call at a cheaper rate. It would be legitimate for them to contractually require you to give them what they paid for, and enforce.
I think it comes down to, are you providing what you are actually being paid for - in the first case pristine inventions, in the final case literally your time.
The other side of this is - in engineering we are trusted to tell the employer how much work we are able to do in a period. At sprint planning I tell my team I can get these 3 tasks done this week and that goes unchallenged.
You could say that it is legitimate for employees to quote less than a full weeks work to their first job to leave room for some work from their second job, because if they aren't getting enough work done they will be fired.
Honestly that assumes a much more aggressive, KPI driven environment than most of us are lucky enough to work in. Would you like to work for a company where your productivity is measured according to some arbitrary KPI like "lines of code" or "supervisor assigned work volume points" or "team agreed scrum points"* and if you aren't in the top 2/3rds in a quarter you get fired? This is normal in sales but generally not in our comfy software roles. Be careful what you wish for.
* A lot of places do stack ranking but it is about getting rid of the negative outliers. Stack ranking to force average performance would be a lot worse.
If this assumption is made impractical im afraid companies will react by putting stricter measures like clock in and out times and crap like that.
At the same time, if an employee wants to work two jobs, all the power to them. Go get it buddy, screw the companies, you owe them nothing.
The law should make this data a liability. Companies like Equifax should not even want to have access to this data. It should cost them money every day to know this information. They should be trying to forget everything they know about us, not amassing even more data.
Not only does it exist, Equifax itself offers this as a service, Equifax's offering is called The Work Number.
You can access your record here - https://employees.theworknumber.com/?_ga=2.101852741.5983227...
From the article -
>For a company like Equifax, this trends represents a potential business opportunity. The company sells a product called Talent Report Employment Monitoring so other companies can keep tabs on potential moonlighting by their employees, too.
I kinda doubt that :)
Anyone from California submit a CCPA deletion or request for all information they have on you?
If so, what did they say?
Doesn't everyone set up a cubicle at their house to set the right mood?
Kind of like a mini bunker in your own home.
How?
If companies really want to go down this path then they will have to stop harassing employees who require reference letters or work experience letters as well without much fuss & also keep directors who are board members in other companies on a leash as well.
The difference between being understanding because rescheduling meetings because someone's family is sick vs they want to take a meeting for another job.
If they just got a second job I can fire them before their performance dips.
It's a reason to skip past six months of a PIP
There are lots of reasons.
I would assume there is none too significant, but would be interesting.
Which is an interesting admission on Equifax's part. An investigation of over 1000, including interviews and the like, literally thousands of man hours...to find 24 people who had jobs on the side, but whose performance wasn't poor enough to warrant being let go in and of itself.
Tells you something about Equifax's priorities.
It stated that in one calendar year, I made slightly less than minimum wage. It also stated that during high school I was working for a civil engineering firm on the opposite end of the country doing engineering work.
If an employer places any faith in that data, you probably don't want to work for them.
From a GDPR perspective this would probably be seen as a massive violation exposing Equifax to serious fines.
From a security certification perspective as this is now public knowledge and the company seems to be unrepentant Equifax clients can not claim their are entrusting their data to a company with proper security controls. Equifax should fail their next security certification audit for this.
Is it an option to not use CC in your life? I don't but I understand people in the city may have a different experience.
Honestly the CC isn’t the problem, it’s mobile phone notification culture. One billion meaningless daily notifications, I just shut everything off. I had used a backwater credit card that I never touch to pay for parking and suddenly CC company was livid that I was delinquent. I rack up over $100 in late fees and lost 100 pts off my cred score. To resolve the issue I had to snail mail in a letter asking them to update the report with the credit score agencies.
Just such a carnival, regardless of how much you want to victim blame me
We all make mistakes, but your score represents the balance of your track record. Is life complicated? Do you innocently forget to make a payment, and then pay back the fees? Do you miss notifications because your spam filter was overly aggressive? I understand all those things. But if that happens a lot maybe credit cards aren't usually the right tool for you. And if you insist otherwise but fail to make payments on time anyway and call yourself a victim of that system, that's exactly the kind of thing I want to know as a potential creditor.
That's different from credit reporting agencies losing your data through negligence, lacking transparency in the algorithm changes that affect people, doing unethical things with the data like was reported yesterday. Let's be clear that none of those things is what happened to you.
At a previous job where we were all 100% remote, we dealt with an employee who did this. We caught him because his work quality was poor and he was unavailable for days at a time on Slack. It took a lot of time to investigate and justify the firing.
After being fired, he laughed with folks about how long he got away with his subterfuge. This job paid $100k+. IMO, his actions were criminal. He stole from the company.
I am usually EXTREMELY passionate about data privacy. My worry is that I don’t know for what purpose companies will use my data – that they will use it unfairly against me. Excepting errors, IMO, this is a fair use.
And what if his work quality had been consistent and his availability what you expected it to be? Would you still have this reaction?
Of course, if an employee's being useless, perhaps warn / eventually fire them, irrespective to whether they have a second job, which again should be none of the employers' business.
I believe companies have a duty to try to help struggling employees. The corollary is employee’s must do their best for their employer.
If an employee is doing a great job, they can have 50 simultaneous jobs. I don’t care.
> It took a lot of time to investigate and justify the firing.
So you already knew the work was of poor quality. That's enough reason to let them go. Why do you need to investigate and justify it any further? You don't need to invade their privacy.
> I feel angry at those who lack integrity
I feel angry about a lot of stuff but employees exploiting corporations isn't one of them. I wouldn't do it myself because that's not how my father raised me to behave. I just don't really feel anything when others do it.
Do you think these companies have integrity, loyalty? They have an generally terrible reputation due to their long history of having neither. Do you seriously believe they're a victim here? I mean, we're in a thread discussing the overreach of surveillance capitalism that enables collusion to reduce wages. All this integrity talk is ridiculous in that light.
The fact is that employee just didn't work out for the company. A false positive in the interview process. That's always a risk when you work with other human beings. He didn't "steal" from the company.
He absolutely stole from the company. He agreed to do his best for at least 40 hours a week. The company paid him for that.
Integrity means to do what you say you are going to do. Two wrongs don’t make a right. If he didn’t like the company, he could have quit.
Edit: To the theft part, I will also add that while that employee was “working” for the company, we were unable to hire someone else. So not only was he stealing from the company, he was stealing the opportunity from someone else.
In the case of my previous employer, we did not use the Equifax service. However, we did have to compile significant evidence of underperformance. Do not underestimate the difficulty of firing someone, even in the U.S.
"secretly" ? Why you'd need to tell your employer that in the first place ?