“I wouldn’t be able to judge the merit of such a request without that information.”
That’s meaningless since you pay what you want and the person accepts what they want. Using prior employment salary information as leverage is wrong. “Your prior employer only paid you x so will we.” So, what you are assaying is that the prior employer and you collude to set wages. That’s price fixing, an illegal monopolistic practice.
I don't think so, not when every one of these requests goes through our legal people over at human resources. It also looks like you assume that we would look at previous salary and then lower what we would otherwise offer, which is not the case at all. The situation is that prospective new employees want to be paid more coming in the door, and one piece of evidence they provide to support that is their salary at their current employer. I look at several factors before I make a recommendation.
Worth repeating!