My twin sister Alita and I have a credit problem: not because we’ve defaulted on loans or skipped bills, but because the US credit rating agencies can’t seem to tell us apart….

You rarely hear about these issues, but they’re surprisingly common — and not just for twins. People can be declared dead by credit agencies, get stuck in limbo after a name change, or just slip through the cracks. In 2012, the FTC asked 1,001 consumers to request credit reports from the big three agencies. Roughly 26 percent of the study participants found incorrect information on at least one of their reports. In 2015, the FTC in a follow-up study asked 121 consumers to examine unresolved disputes — and almost 70 percent of them believed that their errors still hadn’t been corrected. There have been congressional hearings, lawsuits with regulators, and decades of political pressure, but the system simply refuses to shape up….

But there are people for whom this kind of issue could be devastating. It’s not hard to imagine a situation where someone falls on hard times and is looking for a lifeline in the form of credit, and then discovers that they’re ineligible, due to some bureaucratic snafu. As the system currently stands, we have three companies that have a vast amount of control and little meaningful oversight. Until some sort of regulatory power steps in, the tangle of the system may only get worse.

Read more:

Clark, M. (2021, May 12). Credit agencies can’t tell my sister and me apart. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/22421193/credit-reporting-infrastructure-errors-experian-equifax-transunion