Allow me to do an end-zone happy dance. It may be a brief one, but I’m gonna dance anyway.
Julie Miller, a woman from Oregon, filed suit against Equifax after a two-year battle to get her credit report corrected. She won an $18 million settlement:
Ms. Miller contacted Equifax eight times between 2009 and 2011 trying to rectify the mistakes. The jury awarded Ms. Miller $18.4million in punitive damages and $180,000 in compensatory damages.
Mistakes included erroneous accounts and collection attempts, the wrong Social Security number and birthday, according to a copy of the lawsuit reviewed by MailOnline.
‘There was damage to her reputation, a breach of her privacy and the lost opportunity to seek credit,’ said Portland attorney Justin Baxter. ‘She has a brother who is disabled and who can’t get credit on his own, and she wasn’t able to help him.’
Ms. Miller claims in the suit that she discovered the mangled mess made of her credit report after being denied credit by a local bank in December 2009. She reached out to Equifax and complied with multiple requests for forms and additional information only to have her efforts repeatedly go nowhere. Additional efforts to obtain copies of her credit report also proved unsuccessful.
The credit bureaux should be happy I wasn’t the judge. I’d have authorized their complete sell-off and liquidation, using the National Guard if necessary. Yep, I’ve fought with Equifax too.
The credit reporting industry has an absurd amount of power – and while I joke (and not in a “hah hah” kind of way) about using the Air Force to re-jigger the market, and acknowledge they serve a role in the free market, they do the job really, really badly.
The 18 million dollar settlement will no doubt get shaved down to $5000 at appeal. But it’s a start.
So it wasn’t a settlement, but an award? Settlements don’t get appealed, they are an agreement between both parties.
No, it’s an award. Equifax is appealing the decision so it will no doubt get lowered.
Equifax has opened my eyes once or twice about how badly a credit bureau can be run and still operate. I’ve seen obvious mistakes in the report from folks who had not even similar names or social security numbers once I’ve challenged them, and they have been horrible at fixing things. I thought I had it bad until Ms. Miller showed it could even be worse. I think I got one of their better folks when I complained.
All this shows one more reason I’m really opposed to using credit or credit bureaus. This stupid expansion of credit is supposed to be “good for the economy” but far too many folks don’t know what they’re doing to themselves by using so much of it. Easy credit is nice, but it’s bankrupting too many folks. I remember the old days when folks had to go to an actual credit officer at a bank to get a credit card. These days you have to actually fend off offers or you’ll get a mailbox full of them daily.
The value companies like Equifax add to the economy is the correct valuation of risk.
You know, like Bear Stearns & the big financial houses the taxpayers bailed out in 2008.
The credit bureaus value the relative risk on average fairly well, but they’re only one part of the equation for the financial empires. The other part is the interest rate you’ll get charged as a fee to use their services. When usury laws were effectively abolished you saw an explosion of credit availability, but it came with rates that were far higher than before. That made “bad credit” a far more profitable business than it was before and has put far more Americans into debt slavery and bankruptcy, and honestly it’s hurt the country in terms of stability of families.
I was half expecting one of the Lefty type commenters here to sneer “See Berg, you’re all for Government when it’s protecting your white heinie !11!1!!”.
I’m not sneering; one of the few jobs I look for the government or at least the courts to do (and do well) is enforce contracts. Credit bureaus have a contractual duty to have correct information on potential borrowers. Creditors who get bad information on potential customers lose out on sales when the credit bureaus have the wrong information and it leads to them to not offering credit when they should.
To echo Seflores sentiments…one primary function of government is to define and enforce laws, including contract law.
Regardless how those on the left try to portray conservatives/libertarians, we all know government is necessary. But simply because something is necessary doesn’t , by default, mean more of it is better.
Now if Ms. MIller had, in trying to correct her credit mess with Equifax, spilled hot coffee in her lap…