“If you’re out of work for a long time, you have difficulty paying your bills,” says Amy Traub, coauthor of a June report from the think tank Demos that calls for reform of the credit reporting industry. “If potential employers are looking at credit scores, how on earth are you going to pay your bills then?”
What’s more, the credit bureaus themselves acknowledge there is no proof of a link between a person’s credit report and their suitability as an employee. “At this point we don’t have any research to show any statistical correlation between what’s in somebody’s credit report and their job performance or their likelihood to commit fraud,” TransUnion representative Eric Rosenberg admitted to Oregon legislators last January.