Note that QuickBooks will now contribute to this data unless an employer explicitly opts out. I had to bring it to my employer's attention when they first rolled it out. Most small businesses that use QuickBooks won't have heard of it and will be contributing salary data by default.
"No data is shared unless your employees specifically request it to be shared, usually as part of an application process for loans, credit, or public aid, or in response to a permissible purpose under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”), such as a court order."
I read that the first time as "no data is shared with verifiers", rather than "no data is shared with Equifax", but on a closer reading I believe you're correct: the data stays with QuickBooks until Equifax receives a request and they forward that request to QuickBooks. So they're not shipping data to Equifax en masse.
That somewhat mitigates the concerns of data being lost in another Equifax data breach assuming that Equifax only fulfills requests from verifiers that have received my express consent, and assuming that consent doesn't become mandatory for employment (which is the subject of the larger discussion on this thread).
https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-artic...