MERit Systems Creates HR-XML Link to Credit Bureaus

More and more, companies are using credit reports in their background checks of prospective employees. A credit report gives insight into a potential employee's financial responsibility.

The three nationwide credit reporting agencies provide credit reports for employment purposes, but each bureau has a different proprietary format. Experians Employee Insight, Equifaxs Persona, and Trans Unions PEER are the most widely used.

When MERit Credit Systems, a software company devoted to credit report retrieval tools, discovered that many major clients wanted to use its MERit Credit Engine for employment credit reports, HR-XML became a top priority.

Business Rationale

The MERit Credit Engine (MCE) is an on-site enterprise-level credit retrieval resource. Its purpose is to help companies integrate credit bureau data into their strategic processes. Various factors in the past have made this a difficult undertaking for businesses, financial, and governmental institutions.

The traditional text-based" employment credit report is delivered in human readable" format, not suitable for automated processing. For example, a computer program designed to find a persons prior address by looking for a specific heading in the report, or by counting a number of rows and columns to find it, is doomed to fail. The credit bureaus dont publish the exact layouts of their textual credit reports, and reserve the right to change layouts at any time.

The MERit Credit Engine meets these challenges by retrieving credit bureau data and storing it in industry-leading SQL databases. Integrators to can request and deal with credit data, just as they deal with other data in their organizations.

HR-XML became the next logical step in the evolution, particularly to meet the needs of MCE customers doing background screening. Being extensible, largely self-documenting, and compatible with new tools and methods, HR-XML provides a way to further simplify integration with other automated systems.

About HR-XML

HR-XML is an independent, non-profit consortium dedicated to enabling e-commerce and human resources data interchange universal.

By developing and publishing open data exchange standards based on Extensible Markup Language ("XML"), the Consortium aims to provide the means for any company to transact with other companies without having to establish, engineer, and implement many separate interchange mechanisms. HR-XMLs efforts are focused on standards for staffing and recruiting, benefits enrollment, payroll, competencies, and workforce management. For further information, see www.hr-xml.org.

About MERit Credit Systems

MERit Credit Systems located in Glendora, CA specializes in online credit report retrieval software for businesses requiring quick and effective access to credit information from Equifax, Experian, and Trans Union. MERit has been certified by all three of the major national credit repositories For further information, see www.creditengine.net.