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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
U.S. credit reports hard to fix
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Americans are virtually powerless to correct damaging mistakes in their credit reports due to loopholes and obstacles in the federal law governing credit-reporting agencies, an Ohio newspaper reported Sunday.
The lack of government regulation allows errors that wrongly deny thousands of people the chance to buy homes or cars, take out a college loan, receive medical care or even open a checking account, The Columbus Dispatch wrote. The report is the first of four parts looking at the three largest national credit-reporting agencies and the lack of federal regulation over the reporting system.
The newspaper's yearlong investigation collected and analyzed nearly 30,000 consumer complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission over 30 months beginning in 2009 and with attorneys general in 24 states in 2009 and 2010. The newspaper said it requested complaints from all 50 attorneys general, but some states don't make the records public, some did not co-operate and others charged fees that were too high.
The complaints alleging violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act by Equifax, Experian and TransUnion document how consumers across the country have failed to get even obvious mistakes such as wrong birthdates and names corrected.
More than five per cent of complaints to the FTC and more than 40 per cent of those to attorneys general say reports had wrong personal information. An Ohio man born in 1968 complained that his report identified him as having been a police officer since 1923.
-- The Associated Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 7, 2012 B6
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