"Credit bureaus willing to tolerate errors, experts say" by Tara Siegel Bernard | New York Times, August 03, 2013
She tried suing. That worked. A jury in US District Court in Portland, Ore., last week awarded her a whopping $18.4 million in punitive damages, which, according to consumer lawyers, is the largest individual case on record.
If you think this has taught Equifax and the other credit reporting companies a lesson, you are a lot more optimistic than close observers of the industry. They say that despite the huge judgment, little is going to change for the millions of Americans who discover errors in their credit reports.
The credit bureaus are willing to tolerate these errors — and settle with consumers out of court — as a cost of doing business, according to credit experts and lawyers who work on these cases.
“Their business model is to keep doing the same thing over and over again,” said Justin Baxter, the lead lawyer on Miller’s case. “They can buy off a number of consumers with small dollar amounts and get rid of the vast majority of cases. To Equifax, that’s the cost of doing business.”
Banks have the same model, and both credit and financial markets are intricately linked.
Julie Miller, a 57-year-old nurse who works in a dermatologist’s office, made every effort to fix her report, exactly as consumers are advised to do. She initiated the company’s dispute process about seven times, and in most instances, Equifax would spit back a form letter saying it needed more proof of her identity. So she sent her pay stub and her phone bill. When that didn’t work, she sent her pay stub and her driver’s license. And when that failed, she sent her W-2 form and an insurance bill — at least three times.
But nothing ever changed: Miller, a model financial citizen who once had the credit score to prove it, had become mixed up with another, much less creditworthy Julie Miller.
At least her name isn't Judith Miller; then she would be completely discredited due to war lies.
After she was denied a line of credit from KeyBank, she discovered 38 collection accounts on her credit report, none of which belonged to her, along with an inaccurate Social Security number and birth date. Her financial life was no longer her own.
Mixed files, as they are known in the credit industry, most frequently involve people who share common names with individuals who have similar Social Security numbers, birth dates, or addresses. But these errors are notorious for being among the most difficult to fix, credit experts said, and require human intervention to untangle the mess. But given the huge number of disputes, the process to address them is largely automated. And that is the excuse the industry advances to consumers who get stuck in its web.
WTF? ONCE AGAIN we get another LAME-ASS EXCUSE from some AmeriKan in$titution!!
The bureaus often outsource thousands of disputes daily to workers overseas.
Yes, American, you read that right. That certainly can't be helping communications.
Those workers, often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases, are largely told to translate the problem into a two- or three-digit code that defines the gist of the problem (account not his/hers, for instance) and feed it into a computer.
But that process won’t untangle a mixed credit report. The reason files become mixed to begin with can be traced back to the computer formula the bureaus use to match credit data to a specific person’s credit report. It allows credit data, say a late payment on a credit card, to be inserted into a person’s file even if the identifying information isn’t an exact match.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!
Man, I hope the NSA dragnet on their collating computers isn't a pos credit report computer.
Partial matches aren’t always wrong, of course....
Yeah, there's nothing really wrong with the $y$tem. Just a couple of glitche$.
There is a reason the bureaus operate this way. They would rather err on the side of including too much information in your credit report than leave information out, according to consumer lawyers and advocates.
But they are too busy and overwhelmed to make sure it's accurate.
It's sort of like a Bush administration report on Iraqi WMD.
“The bureaus would rather accept the possibility of some mixed-file risk rather than the possibility that a debtor who owes a debt gets away with it,” said Leonard Bennett, a consumer lawyer in Newport News, Va., who said he received 20 to 40 mixed-file cases a month....
In other words, they work for the banks (who get taxpayer-funded bailouts for their bad loans)!
What else could she have possibly done? I asked the credit bureaus for advice. Equifax declined to comment, and would only say that it was “very disappointed in the jury verdict” and was exploring its options, including an appeal....
It’s more likely, though, that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which began overseeing the large credit bureaus in September, will have more impact....
Didn't it say something above like "but nothing ever changed?" That's what I expect here.
Consumers never did have much power in AmeriKa; now they have even less.
--more--"
Oh, right, Ms. Miller won.
Now those ads is going to make me angry!
