’60 Minutes’ Show Gets Facts All Wrong in Report on Credit Reporting Agencies

By: Ifrah Law

The credit reporting industry – dominated by Experian, Equifax and Transunion – maintains a precarious balance of obligations: On the one hand, these companies bear a responsibility to banks and other businesses at large to retain reliable information to ensure that the credit scores they report are a fair representation of the individual’s credit-worthiness. On the other hand, federal law, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act, imposes an obligation upon the credit reporting agencies and other related companies to conduct reasonable investigations to address disputes about errors in individuals’ credit files. In both instances, the companies bear a weighty responsibility.

For this reason, companies in the credit reporting industry are subject to intensive regulatory scrutiny – historically by the Federal Trade Commission and, more recently, by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Both agencies have issued reports on their studies of the way in which credit reporting companies handle the information entrusted to them, and how they respond to consumer disputes.

This past Sunday, CBS’s 60 Minutes – a show that most people associate with responsible news reporting – ran a segment that unfairly distorted these reports about credit reporting agencies’ compliance with their obligations. The show, which was largely based on an advance copy of an FTC study, relied upon selective interpretation of the data in that study, throwing out snippets of information without being specific on what the data meant.

The vast majority of the story can hardly be viewed as unbiased: interviews with a politically motivated state attorney general, two plaintiffs’ attorneys who spend their careers suing the credit reporting agencies, a handful of dissatisfied consumers, and several disgruntled former call center employees whose role in addressing consumer complaints was never really explained in a meaningful way. The result was a show clearly intended to convey a message that the credit data retained by these companies is riddled with errors, and that the credit reporting agencies fail to comply with their legal obligations to take steps when there is a claim of an inaccuracy.

In fact, as the Consumer Data Industry Association has pointed out, the FTC study shows that 98 percent of credit reports are materially accurate. In this regard, 60 Minutes missed the most critical point in the research – that the measure of accuracy is tied to the question of whether an error has consequences for consumers and not just whether there is an error that has little or no impact on credit scores. The FTC study actually concluded that only 2.2 percent of credit reports have an error that would lead to higher-priced credit for the consumer.

60 Minutes compounded its error by repeatedly asserting that it was “nearly impossible to expunge” an error in a credit report, and providing a forum for a state attorney general and two plaintiffs’ attorneys to assert that the credit reporting companies do not comply with their obligations under federal law. This one-sided treatment does not square with a 2011 study from the Political and Economic Research Council that showed that consumers were satisfied with the resolution of their disputes in 95 percent of the cases. It also does not square with the results of a year-long study of the dispute process by the FTC in which the agency found no violations of law.

It is not hard to understand what motivated 60 Minutes to run this story: Because everyone has a credit score, an inflammatory story about credit scores is likely to get everyone’s attention. But the one-sided and distorted way in which 60 Minutes presented this information was a disservice to the public. And even if credit reporting agencies are not perfect, they deserve better treatment at the hands of those who have the public’s ear.