Yesterday Laura Ceretti, corporate counsel for TALX Corporation, favored me with a letter about my blog post Does that Debt Collector Know What Was On Your Last Paycheck. She believes that the post was inaccurate and demanded that I both delete portions of the post and post a retraction.
She may be correct about at least part of my post. She complained about my statement that “TALX will sell your salary information to any debt collector who asks.” That may well not be true. At the time of my post, TALX may have had criteria for determining who was eligible to purchase salary information that would have excluded some debt collectors. I really don’t know one way or the other and Ms. Ceretti’s letter does not shed any light on the subject.
I based my post on information that I found on TALX’s website. TALX has either deleted that information or moved it so that the links in my post are now broken. Fortunately, I downloaded copies of the information and have uploaded them so that you can review them for yourself and make your own conclusion about what TALX was selling to debt collectors. The page that I linked to on the TALX site led me to 3 pdf files, a white paper entitled Improving Collections Recovery Rates with Employment Data Integration, a flyer entitled The Work Number Filtered, and a flyer entitled The Work Number Alert.
The general gist of these documents was that TALX was actively marketing its employee information to debt collectors in order to help them increase their collections. The third document, The Work Number Alert states that “users are provided with online access to this information that is used individually, for identifying a customer’s employment, or matched, for evaluating pools of credit customers.” The same document also says that employment and income verification includes, among other things: “pay rate” and “annual income for most recent 2 years.”
In her letter Ms. Ceretti says that third-party debt collectors are only able to access income information with a consumer-provided salary key. None of these TALX documents say that and Ms. Ceretti doesn’t explain how the process works, so I have nothing more to pass along to you than her bald statement that my post was incorrect.
If you have more information about how this product is sold or used, I’d be interested in hearing from you. If you are Ms. Ceretti, please accept my apologies for not emailing you to advise you of this new post, but you didn’t include your email address in your letter.