It's the gift that keeps on giving, right?  Do you have the right as an employer to decline a candidate for an open position at your company based on them having bad credit?

The answer is yes.  There's no law against it.  But - you might think twice about that, because the EEOC just popped Kaplan Learning Systems with a huge lawsuit.  More from the Washington Post:

"The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Tuesday sued The Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan Higher Education unit, alleging that it discriminated against black job applicants by refusing to hire people based on their credit histories.

The EEOC said it is seeking to stop the practice and win wages, benefits and offers of employment for people who were not hired by Kaplan because of the alleged wrongdoing. The commission said it tried to reach a settlement with Kaplan before filing suit.

"Employers need to be mindful that any hiring practice be job-related and not screen out groups of people, even if it does so unintentionally," said Debra Lawrence, the regional EEOC lawyer who is overseeing the suit against Kaplan."

I've got mixed feeling about this.  Do we really need to screen credit on every job in an organization?  I'd say the answer is no.  Should employers have the right to make decisions on how they want to screen candidates?  I'd say the answer is yes.

The devil is in the details, and the details will probably drive how this lawsuit plays out.   Some considerations that will drive this in court:

1. Was Kaplan simply declining people on a credit score threshold?  Can that threshold score be positioned as being artificially high, thus causing the decline of thousands of candidates a court would have deemed credit worthy by a "reasonable" standard?  

2. Was Kaplan simply establishing the threshold as "if you have a bankruptcy, you can't work here?"  My guess is that type of threshold would be seen as more viable by a court - because it declines fewer candidates.

3. Or was Kaplan operating under the "we know it when we see it standard", with wild fluctuations on what was acceptable and what was not?  If that's the case, they're screwed.

It's a powder keg issue, but one thing is for sure.  The Kaplan suit will cause a lot of employers to check their practices during and after the holidays.  

Merry Christmas.  Watch the credit card debt you take on while buying last minute presents, and don't let the number of times you fail to make a payment on your credit card exceed 4 times in 2011.