A New Challenger to Equifax’s Employee Verification Service (opens in new tab)

They use Equifax because the government has actual privacy policies and requires an individual's permission to release information. The government may also not have offered this exact service (they offer a service to release your entire tax form, but I'm not sure they offer one to release only the salary and employer from your W-2's).

There really isn't any reason. This is similar to how Turbotax exists even though the IRS could file your taxes for you. I believe this product is even in development at the IRS based on an interview with the US Digital Service IRS team several years ago (although they were primarily targeting mortgage origination firms as customers of this data, think Quicken's Rocket Mortgage product).

TrueWork could move faster than the IRS can internally, but eventually the IRS' product would be canonical with organizations (while at the same time, salary data privacy laws continue to be enacted state by state prohibiting the release of salary data to perspective employers).

Actually, funny you should ask that. Lately, I have been hearing advertisements on podcasts about the Department of Homeland Security offering such services. They're not offering this as a free service, though. Taxes only pay their salaries. You wouldn't expect that to be sufficient

IRS doesn't have APIs. I've done some work with them, you have to manually upload CSV and download the results hours later. Automating it is against their TOS. For one of the data I get from them, I've the option of getting in printer on paper, DVD or magnetic tape.

Why does it matter if it's Equifax or some other company? Employers are still handing over the data.

I take issue with much of the language used when discussing the Equifax breach. It wasn't a breach that Equifax lost my data. It was a breach that Equifax had my data.

Regardless, I don't see replacing one scumbag company for a different scumbag company as really fixing anything. Also this article is nothing more than a PR piece for Truework. Shame on the NYT for publishing such drivel and calling it journalism.

Thank you for your efforts!