I'm already tired of everything being turned into a civil rights issue, but I will agree that the abuse of credit reports for rejecting applicants should stop.
Some privacy and minority advocates are now seeing credit as a civil rights issue as minorities start to fight employers and insurers who base decisions on credit histories. Their effort could slow the near doubling in credit checks by employers in the past decade, which impacts millions of Americans who are struggling with debt.
I can understand checking credit if the person is going to be handling money or something like that, but it makes no sense to me that credit checks have become the latest way to weed people out of a process, whether it's for hiring or getting cellular phone service.
In a 2004 study involving 2 million people, the Texas Department of Insurance found that blacks have an average credit score roughly 10 percent to 35 percent worse than whites; Hispanics have scores 5 percent to 25 percent worse than whites.
Credit checks are a growing factor in hiring, with 35 percent of employers checking applicants' credit in 2003, up from 19 percent in 1996, according to the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM).
The worst part about this scenario is that there haven't been any studies that proved a link between bad credit history and poor performance at work.
So far, there's a lack of data supporting a relationship between bad credit and theft by employees. In perhaps the only study published on the subject, Jerry Palmer and Laura Koppes at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond in 2003 found no correlation between employee credit reports and negative performance or termination for dishonesty.
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