Credit Report Crafters Nervous About Their Profits Being Legislated Away

TransUnion is fighting tooth and nail to prevent legislation that would prevent employers from using credit histories during the course of employment screening, what with the economy being as lousy as it is and people being more likely to have dings on their records these days. The company is even going so far as to attempt sleights-of-language in their efforts! The problem, of course, comes when that sort of trickery actually works, as it almost did with one poor Illinois legislator who apparently didn’t understand the specific reasons for the bill’s existence before allowing a lobbyist to goad him into suggesting some modifications.

In Illinois, legislators said privately held TransUnion twice attempted to introduce language into a proposed Employee Credit Privacy Act that would have rendered it meaningless. The bill would prohibit employers from “discriminating against an individual with respect to hiring, discharging, employment, compensation … or privilege of employment because of the individual’s credit history,” or from “inquiring about an applicant’s or employee’s credit history.”

The bill, expected to be voted on soon by the Senate after passage in the House, allows for exemptions for jobs in which employees have unsupervised access to cash and personal information. Bills such as Illinois’ have support from national groups that promote labor and minority rights.

Franks said a lobbyist working for TransUnion “duped him” into replacing references to “credit history” with “credit scores,” which are not used in hiring.

“I called (the lobbyist) and said, ‘Hey, listen. Good work. You fooled me,’’’ Franks said. He said that change would have gutted the bill.

Democracy in action! It goes down a bit easier if you just think of this brief clip:

OK, it doesn’t go down that much easier.