Mark Winston Griffith

Protecting Ourselves against the Credit Protectors

In a sign that everything is fair in love, war and credit, the New York Times reported on Tuesday how identity theft is big business - not just for the identity thieves, but for the credit reporting industry itself. As staffers from the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP), the organization I'm with, go out and conduct workshops on protecting assets, we have long warned consumers about subscribing to credit monitoring services that are supposed to flag suspicious activity. Nonetheless, 12 million Americans, typically paying $80 a year, have signed up for such services which, theoretically at least, alert consumers when lenders have requested their credit files.

For people victimized by identity theft, this might be well worth it, but it just points to the absurdity of the credit reporting/credit scoring racquet which is- make no mistake about it - designed to increase revenues for and protect the financial services industry. Adding insult to injury, credit reports are often inaccurate. According to a 2004 study by US PIRG 25% of all credit reports contain serious errors that can have an adverse affect on a person's ability to obtain credit. In NEDAP's Community Financial Literacy and Justice course we note that almost 80% of all credit reports contain at least one error of some kind.

One policy which is working its way across the country is to give consumers the power to preventing outsiders from accessing to their credit report. Given the fact that none of us asked for this information to be compiled and made public in the first place, it's an idea whose time has come.

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Posted at 10:29 AM, Dec 15, 2006 in
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