Amex FR and theworknumber.com

[bada_bing]

I'm curious if anyone who has been FR'ed by Amex on a personal card has their

reported income come from a job with an employer that reports to theworknumber.com ?

I was reading around the forum and saw theworknumber.com mentioned. For those

that don't know, theworknumber.com is a part of Equifax that provides reports for

employment verification and income reporting. Not all employers report in, probably

mostly larger corporations. 

I work for and derive about 80% of my income from a big mega-corp. I have a small

sole-proprietor biz that makes the other 20%. Both are longterm, I've been at both for

~20 years. On my personal cards I report only my employment income. I have one

business card; Ink Cash.

I looked on theworknumber.com after reading about it today. I pulled my report. Wow, it

shows every individual bi-monthly paycheck amount I've received for the last 7 years. It

also showed that Amex pulled my report about a year ago. It must have been routine, I

had nothing unusual happening with Amex anywhere close to that time. I certainly was

unaware that the report existed and could be pulled without my knowledge. Amex was

the only CC issuer listed that had pulled my report, although a couple mortgage lenders

had.

I have several questions, mostly for my own interest:

Has anyone with an employer that reports to theworknumber.com also been FR'ed

by Amex ? It seems like Amex would have no need to FR someone if their reported income

matched their theworknumber report. Anyone get FR'ed that maybe has a theworknumber

report that doesn't cover all their income and makes it look like they may have overreported ?

Can it be a trigger for FR? Since I have a theworknumber report and my reported income is

slightly underreported compared to my theworknumber report, am I protected from FR if I

ask for a CLI closer to 40% of my reported income? I've been stuck at $25K CL for a while,

partly for not wanting to trigger a FR.

[abundancejones]

Interesting. According to their FAQ, they are not allowed to pull unless you give permission. Here is what they said

" Equifax requires that verifiers have employee authorization to access income information. This allows the employee control over who has the ability to pull their income."

[maksimfa]

Wow, did not know such thing exists.  If I was an employee and my information was shared like that, I would be furious.  Humn, just got my topic for next blog article. 

[CreditUnionFan]

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@abundancejones wrote:

Interesting. According to their FAQ, they are not allowed to pull unless you give permission. Here is what they said

" Equifax requires that verifiers have employee authorization to access income information. This allows the employee control over who has the ability to pull their income."

---

Ah, now we know why Barclay's recently added "other third-party sources" to their terms.

Once they've left it generic like this, they can go wherever they want.

[genz]

They can only access employment information. To access income information, they need to get an access code from you.

[bada_bing]

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@genz wrote:
They can only access employment information. To access income information, they need to get an access code from you.

---

That's interesting. I see on the site where I could get a code to give someone to review the report.

The full report is detailed. Like I posted, it contains the amount of every individual paycheck for the

last 7 years, including annual bonus amounts. I'm not so sure I'd prefer to release this over a 4506T

tax form release. The tax forms might be less intrusive.

I'm guessing that you agree to pulling just employment information in the T&C in the fine print of card

agreements. I know I didn't specifically authorize an Amex pull of my report, I didn't know such a

thing existed until yesterday. Since the only people who can have their employment verified are those

that work for reporting companies - usually big multi-state companies - I wonder what the value to Amex

is. It proves I have a job, but a non-result doesn't prove anything about whether I'm employed or not.

[rlx01]

I don't see any CC related pulls on TWN from Amex.

However if you sign up for their FX service, they pull it for some reason.

The only other puller on there is Equifax eID, which is (I think) when you go to request a free annual credit report and it generates some authentication questions.

I'm not really surprised that a lot of new T&Cs include employment and income verification language. Presumably so they can pull TNW.