Is bad credit an accurate predictor of employee trustworthiness or reliability? Or is it discriminatory? We first discussed this in 2011, before the great debates began.
The New York Times today has a great article, “The Long Shadow of Bad Credit,” that nicely illustrates the on-going debate about credit checks and trustworthiness, and the proliferation of anti-credit checking laws. It uses interviews with employees, employers and credit reporting bureau spokespeople, as well as studies on whether there is a statistical correlation between bad credit and job performance or propensity for committing fraud, to highlight the arguments for and against such laws.
And whether the use of credit checks is a way to discriminate illegally “[i]f you have five people and can’t make up your mind.”
The NYT link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/business/employers-pull-applicants-credit-reports.html?pagewanted=all