Hot off the press for your weekend perusal, a report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus documenting how badly the credit bureaus are handling disputes and the massive scale of the problem. Some stunning statistics and a 🧵1/9 coronavirus.house.gov/news/press-rel…
Nearly 336 million. That’s how many individual items or “tradelines” were disputed on credit reports during 2019-2021. 2/9 
Consumers often dispute more than one item when they submitted a dispute to the credit bureaus. The report doesn’t say how many disputes overall per year but noted it’s twice as much as CFPB had estimated; @Equifax alone received nearly 14 million disputes in 2021 3/9
7 to 13 minutes. That’s the average amount that @Equifax and @Experian_US spent on each dispute. And since consumer disputed more than one item, it was even less time per item. What about @TransUnion ? Well, we don’t know since they didn’t provide the information. 4/9
But it was probably less because TU has waay fewer staff. Equifax had 1040 to 1300 staff handling disputes in 2019-2021. Experian had 550 to 730 staff. TransUnion had as little as … 171. Even though all 3 credit bureaus handled roughly the same # of items disputed 5/9
13.8 million disputes. That’s the number discarded by the credit bureaus without investigation from 2019 to 2021. They have a bad habit of tossing out disputes when they think credit repair is involved. The problem – they use “broad and speculative criteria” to do that. 6/9
Experian uses factors such as “same/similar ink color,” and “same/similar font.” TransUnion uses “multiple envelopes of the same size … color … [and] type,”. So if I send a dispute in a standard #10 envelope using blue ink … it’s treated as credit repair? 7/9
About 5% to 25% of the time. That’s how often disputed info was removed. Equifax made no changes 53-57% of the time, Experian made no changes around 48%, and TransUnion made no changes 47-51%. The rest of the time, they changed some info, but not in response to the dispute. 8/9
And finally the most important numbers:
Over 200M consumers with credit reports
3 credit bureaus that form an unresponsive oligopoly
1 regulator we are counting on to hold them accountable
And 1 – we need 1 public credit registry to give these companies some competition
9/9
Over 200M consumers with credit reports
3 credit bureaus that form an unresponsive oligopoly
1 regulator we are counting on to hold them accountable
And 1 – we need 1 public credit registry to give these companies some competition
9/9
PS thanks to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, its Chair @WhipClyburn and the Subcommittee staff for absolutely fantastic work on this report
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