The next time you apply for a loan or a new job, a lender or prospective employer might go online to access a database instead of calling your human resources department to verify your employment and income.

In most cases, they’ll be contacting a company called TALX Corp., which developed a service called The Work Number.

Companies, government agencies and creditors, such as credit card companies and mortgage lenders, have been using The Work Number for almost a decade, tapping into a database with approximately 165 million to 170 million individual records (an employee has a separate record for each employer) covering roughly a third of the American work force, says Janet Ford, vice president of St. Louis-based TALX, which is a subsidiary of credit bureau Equifax.

Employers use TALX to handle salary and employment verifications and, in turn, share their payroll information and often several years’ worth of payroll records. Employees can challenge the accuracy of any information.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Business Redux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.