Credit Reporting Woes? Tell it to the CFPB

The credit reporting industry has given us plenty to complain about:  credit reports too often contain errors,  the errors are fiendishly hard to fix, reports and scores are not accessible enough to consumers, and credit information is increasingly being used for a variety of extraneous purposes, among numerous other problems (for the full bill of complaint, see my paper Discrediting America).  While many of these problems will require legislation or regulation to fix, some can be addressed immediately with the assistance of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which begins accepting consumers’ individual complaints about credit reporting today.

The CFPB announces that it can work on complaints including:

• Incorrect information on a credit report
• A consumer reporting agency’s investigation
• Improper use of a credit report,
• Being unable to get a copy of a credit score or file, and
• Problems with credit monitoring or identify protection services.

Unfortunately, the complaint database cannot help jobseekers angry that poor credit was held against them in a job search (currently perfectly legal under federal law) or that they must pay just to look at a credit score compiled from data about their own personal behavior. Still, it's likely to be more effective than kvetching on PissedConsumer.com  and will help to focus the CFPB’s investigatory and enforcement actions.

To file a complaint with the CFPB, consumers can go to https://help.consumerfinance.gov/app/creditreporting/ask