And now, they can Fire you if you ever had Bad Credit History
A friend of mine had been struggling with somewhat serious credit card debts of about $9000 that he carried for quite a while and wasn't been able to pay back. It wasn't anything frivolous that saddled him with that sum - his newborn child had serious problems starting out and my friend needed to dip into his credit cards to help manage the situation. But there's something that came out of his credit card situation that he never knew to expect - he says his bad credit history got him fired from his job. The surprising thing here is that he works for the government, for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Ohio. They say that bad credit history ruins a person's security stature in a way that will be difficult to accept at a high-security government position.
But that employer is hardly the only one; there are so many people now with bad credit history, their conditions brought on by all the foreclosures and the unemployment of the past two years; and more and more, employers, both governmental and private, are using credit background checks to make sure that they don't have anything to do with employees with bad credit. There is a reason they say why your credit history should matter. They just believe that the more you are in trouble financially, the more you will be tempted to swindle the company, to embezzle, to accept kickbacks or indulge in unwholesome financial practices.
So are they being completely unfair or is there a certain amount of logic to their position? If you ask me, I'd go on the side of saying that they were just being bloody-minded. More than one out of ten employers have made credit checks a part of their background screening process - for every job, and not just the ones where an employee would come into contact with money or anything to do with money. And secondly, no one has ever proved, not even close, that people with bad credit history and financial problems are likely to steal or indulge in anything dishonest.
About one out of four employers readily admits that if they got an application from someone whose credit report mentioned a bankruptcy at any time at all in his life, that they would not consider him. The thing is, to hold a person's credit situation or bankruptcy against him in employment goes against equal opportunity employment under federal law: it is actually illegal. Not that a little illegality would stand in the way of wanton insensitivity at these companies. In fact there's been a bill being passed that prohibits companies from conducting credit checks at all on employees or on potential employees. The law does make exceptions for certain businesses like banks where employees have to work in close contact with lots of cash. There are lots of other states that are passing these laws too - Washington, Hawaii and many others.
The government has intervened and my friend has his job back now, but no one knows for how long. Basically he just lost his job because he happens to be in an office where they pay the bills of the Department of Defense. That really shouldn't have to be high-security. Pretty soon, there could be lots of companies that find reasons to fire someone because someone happens to have some remote form of access to customers' credit card numbers. A new law when they pass it throughout the country, should make sure that there are no loopholes possible that businesses could use to just claim that they had to pull an employee's bad credit history and fire him because there was some way they could prove that he happens to be within ten feet of someone's credit card number.