Potential employer requesting personal copies of credit report

[Rabid Renaissance]

My better half is applying for jobs and recently received the same form letter response, signed by the same person, for two different job postings that did not appear to be related based on their descriptions. Both of these form letters include a request for her to send in a copy of her credit report (along with suggestions for her to obfuscate her social security number and account numbers) for the next round of screening. Not a request to sign a waiver so that they can run a report on her. They want her to send her own copy in.

So some red flags are certainly going up for me, as investigating internet fraud is a lot of what I do for a living, but this employer or the firm that they've hired to screen applicants could just be ignorant, lazy, or too cheap to pay to run their own employment reports on their applicants.

In this economy, we may not have the luxury of passing over ignorant/lazy/cheap potential employers, but I would like to make sure we pass over any criminally fraudulent ones. My concern is that if she expresses concern about their credit report screening practices, she may end up sabotaging her chances to get hired. On the other hand, by providing some constructive criticism about the practice, she may impress them and end up improving her chances.

Is this a common practice these days for legit employers? It seriously makes my paranoid skin crawl, and the potential for applicants to forge or tamper with the reports that they submit makes them pretty much useless. The employer would need to run their own report anyway to make sure the information was accurate. If they're going to do that, why ask for a copy from the applicants?