Consumer Law

Prof Elizabeth Warren Talks About Credit Reporting on NPR's Fresh Air

By Kemnitzer, Anderson, Barron, Ogilvie & Brewer

Last week, Prof Elizabeth Warren talked about credit reporting on the NPR program Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Ms Gross' husband had to hire an attorney to convince the credit bureaus that someone else's bad debts listed on his reports did not belong to him. In response to Ms Gross' questions how the inaccuracies occur and why it is so hard to correct them, Prof Warren said the credit system is "noisy" with, for example, data associated with social security numbers one digit off being attributed to the wrong person. She said the problem is the credit industry has no incentive to drive errors out of the system. Prof Warren said one in four credit reports have errors serious enough to affect the credit score, which increasingly are used by creditors, insurance companies, employers, landlords, utilities, cell phone companies and student loan companies to make pricing decisions.You can listen to the entire interview at www.npr.org.

Full post as published by California Credit Law Blog on July 09, 2008 (boomark / email).