Just two days before Equifax made public the massive hack of sensitive information of 143 million Americans — which Equifax kept secret for many weeks — U.S PIRG's Ed Mierzwinski posted this piece criticizing the three credit reporting agencies for their incompetence and congressional republicans for seeking to deregulate the industry. Here's an excerpt:
What would you do if you knew that the Big 3 credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion) were all among the Top Five leaders in complaints posted in the full Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Public Consumer Complaint Database (Equifax has more complaints than Wells Fargo!)? What would you do if you knew that their mistake-ridden reports cause consumers to either be denied jobs or pay more for or be denied credit due to those mistakes? Well, if you were the leadership of the House Financial Services Committee, you'd consider not one, but two bills to make this worse by both eliminating strong consumer protections, capping penalties and eliminating the deterrent of punitive damages when credit bureaus wreck consumer lives. (Note on the chart: The Top Ten companies are responsible for over half of the 848,325 complaints in the database today; the chart includes all complaints posted since the inception of the database until today; the CFPB has handled over 1.2 million complaints to date; some have been referred to other agencies; others are still being processed.)
