by Jeff Sovern Brian posted earlier about a letter from senators on the Equifax breach. Not to be outdone, the two dozen Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have written their own letter to Equifax, raising numerous questions about the breach. Among them are queries about the Equifax's arbitration clause, security freeze, credit monitoring services, […]
Category Archives: Credit Reporting
by Jeff Sovern Scott posted yesterday about the Equifax data breach, which may end up being as significant a consumer scandal as the Wells Fargo unauthorized account fiasco. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the disclosure of the Equifax announcement is extraordinary, coming on the same day Congress considered a bill to limit damages against […]
Josh Lauer has written Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. Here's the publisher's description: The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life—yet we know almost nothing […]
So Law360 reports here. The jury apparently found that Transunion did not follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy, as required under FCRA 1681e, when it reported that consumers' names matched those on a government watch list for terrorists and criminals.
Here. Excerpt: [T]he CRA only covers banks, not nonbank financial firms. That leads to an uneven playing field, said Jeffrey Naimon, a BuckleySandler LLP partner. "Banks are asking why should a national nonbank mortgage lender have no CRA but a bank have a CRA requirement?" he said. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition said it is […]
Here. Excerpt: [The report] is harshly critical of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and recommends that the bureau be stripped of its authority to examine financial institutions, people familiar with the matter said. By law, the bureau has the authority to enforce consumer laws as well as to examine individual firms on a continuing basis. […]
Andrea Freeman of Hawai'i has written Racism in the Credit Card Industry, 95 North Carolina Law Review 1071 (2017). Here's the abstract: In a social and financial climate characterized by deep racial and socioeconomic divide, racism against credit card applicants and consumers is a core piece of the systemic inequality that perpetuates dramatic disparities in wealth, […]
Report here. Excerpt: One of Jiménez’s biggest undertakings to date is the Financial Distress Research Project, an initiative she supervises with James Greiner and Lois Lupica, law professors at Harvard and the University of Maine law schools respectively. The goal of the enterprise – a signature project of the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard […]
The decision is here. SCOTUSblog analysis here. Here's the first paragraph of that analysis: The Supreme Court handed a partial but significant victory to cities today, holding that the Fair Housing Act allows the city of Miami to bring a lawsuit alleging that two banks, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, violated the law when […]
Brad Wolverton's article, Your Wallet Will Suffer If This Agency Is Gutted, is an excellent roundup of the Bureau's accomplishments that cuts across a variety of areas, including student loans, credit cards, debt collection, mortgages, payday loans, credit reporting agencies, auto lending, consumer complaints, military protections, and arbitration. Excerpt: Collectively, for every $1 in federal spending on […]