Another Equifax Error

Credit bureaus continue to harm consumers

Andy Spears
2 min readAug 3, 2022
Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

Credit reporting agency Equifax is in the news again for all the wrong reasons. This time, they sent letters containing credit score errors to lenders, potentially damaging chances that borrowers would be approved.

Here’s more from NewsBreak:

The credit scores were sent to lenders for potential borrowers seeking mortgage loans, auto loans, and credit cards. A downward shift of up to 20 points, as indicated in the report of the incident, could have had detrimental impacts on credit decisions.

In a statement, U.S. PIRG noted Equifax’s past errors with consumer data and said the agency must be held accountable.

“After losing our Social Security numbers in the worst data breach in history nearly five years ago, Equifax has shown once again that we can’t trust it to do its one job — a job that Equifax and the other two national bureaus appointed themselves to do. We never asked them nor gave them permission to collect data on us or sell the credit scores derived from that data to lenders,” said Mike Litt, consumer campaign director at U.S. PIRG.

Equifax Response Called “Outrageous”

“Equifax and the other two national credit bureaus serve as gatekeepers to much of the…

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Andy Spears
Andy Spears

Written by Andy Spears

Writer and policy advocate living in Nashville, TN —Public Policy Ph.D. — writes on education policy, consumer affairs, and more . . .