The Trump administration seems to be walking straight into a pair of Fair Credit Reporting Act violations by placing immigrants whom it knows to be alive on the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File. The Death Master File is a list compiled by the Social Security Administration of people Social Security believes to be dead (generally based on the filing of death benefit claims with Social Security, so it is not at all a complete list of who is actually dead). Creditors and other users of consumer reports regularly use the Death Master File, either directly or through a consumer reporting agency, as part of credit granting, employment, or insurance decisions—you don't want to be doing business with someone who is dead (and that might indicate that the living person with whom you are dealing isn't who they say they are). So, Death Master File issues end up being consumer reporting issues and fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, violations of which can not only create substantial private civil liability, but they can also be enjoined in a suit by a state attorney general.
Category: Credit Reporting
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Debt-based driving restrictions: new resources
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Professor Kate Elengold and UNC Law 2L Michael Leyendecker have just posted very useful reports for no charge on the Social Science Research Network. In Professor Elengold's words, these reports "classify, catalog, and cite every state law restricting driving privilege based on debt owed to the state or pursuant to a state-controlled system." This includes criminal or civil fines and fees,child support, taxes, tolls, and more. The Twitter announcement of these resources indicates that they welcome additions and corrections, and that a related scholarly article from Professor Elengold will be available soon.
Here is the driver's license suspension report.
Here is the car registration suspension report.
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New Book Alert: Delinquent
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The University of California Press has published Delinquent: Inside America's Debt Machine by Elena Botella.
Botella used to be "a Senior Business Manager at Capital One, where she ran the company’s Secured Card credit card and taught credit risk management. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Slate, American Banker, and The Nation."
Here's the description from the publisher between the dotted lines below:
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A consumer credit industry insider-turned-outsider explains how banks lure Americans deep into debt, and how to break the cycle.
Delinquent takes readers on a journey from Capital One’s headquarters to street corners in Detroit, kitchen tables in Sacramento, and other places where debt affects people's everyday lives. Uncovering the true costs of consumer credit to American families in addition to the benefits, investigative journalist Elena Botella—formerly an industry insider who helped set credit policy at Capital One—reveals the underhanded and often predatory ways that banks induce American borrowers into debt they can’t pay back.
Combining Botella’s insights from the banking industry, quantitative data, and research findings as well as personal stories from interviews with indebted families around the country, Delinquent provides a relatable and humane entry into understanding debt. Botella exposes the ways that bank marketing, product design, and customer management strategies exploit our common weaknesses and fantasies in how we think about money, and she also demonstrates why competition between banks has failed to make life better for Americans in debt. Delinquent asks: How can we make credit available to those who need it, responsibly and without causing harm? Looking to the future, Botella presents a thorough and incisive plan for reckoning with and reforming the industry.
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Looking forward to reading this book! Also expecting to see more from the University of California Press of direct interest to Credit Slips readers in the years ahead.
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New Year, New Data in Your Credit Score
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During 2021, reports from the CFPB and consumer advocates spotlighted the role of credit scoring in people's financial growth or stagnation and decline. These reports emphasized racial and ethnic disparities in credit scores and in complaints about errors in credit reports. Congressmembers introduced three draft bills aimed at improving credit reporting. Given the problems with traditional credit reports and scores, along with barriers to access to credit and other opportunities faced by the credit invisible, the idea of alternative credit scoring was raised repeatedly last year — in reports, news stories, and in the draft bills. Seemingly in reaction, starting now, Experian is adding data about "buy now, pay later" loans to credit reports. Soon after Transunion announced that it was “well on [its] way” to including the same data.
Sara Greene and I have a new paper about credit reporting and scores, "Credit Scoring Duality," that focuses on the benefits and potential problems of adding alternative data to credit scoring models. Adding more data to credit scores, at first, may seem appealing. More data = better, more accurate scores? However, the use of this alternative data will not necessarily make the credit invisible or people with low credit scores more attractive. Much of the additional data proposed suffer from the same demographic disparities as the data already incorporated into credit scores. That is, in general, the people supposedly helped by inclusion of alternative data are likely to perform below-average on these inputs. Beyond replicating already present disparities, Greene and I worry that pointing to alternative credit scoring as a solution will distract from larger, systemic issues that are shown by disparities in credit scores. For more details, see our draft paper.
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Addressing Credit Invisibility Through Federal Contracting Power
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The Biden administration could substantially reduce the number of "credit invisible" and "thin file" consumers without legislation, simply through a determined use of federal contract regarding multi-family mortgages and wireless spectrum licenses. By requiring credit reporting as a condition of federal purchase of multi-family mortgages or sale of wireless spectrum, the Biden administration could ensuring credit reporting for a lot of renters and all cellphone contracts, which would help millions of Americans start to come into the credit system and escape the Catch-22 of credit invisibility. This would be a major step toward achieving economic equity in the United States.
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The Unconvincing Case for a Public Credit Registry
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Public provision—whether public options or public monopoly—has become all the rage in some progressive circles. I’d like to claim early mover status in this regard—back in 2009 I wrote a piece calling for public provision in payments, and in 2013 I wrote a piece underscoring the importance of public options and public provision in housing finance. One public provision proposal I haven’t previously commented on, but which has been troubling me for a while is the idea of a public credit registry. I’m sympathetic to consideration of public provision as a tool in the regulatory toolbox, and the idea is supported by a bunch of folks whom I very much respect, but I just don’t see the case here at all. Public provision just isn’t a solution to most of the market failures in credit reporting. Moreover, even if there were a case, of all the possible priorities in consumer finance regulation, this seems really far down the list and a poor use of limited agency resources. -
Facebook: the new Credit Reporting Agency?
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Facebook, it seems, has developed a system of rating users trustworthiness. It's not clear if this is just a system for internal use or if users' trustworthiness scores are for sale to third parties, but if the latter, then would sure seem that Facebook is a Consumer Reporting Agency and subject to CRA provisions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
any person which, for monetary fees, dues, or on a cooperative nonprofit basis, regularly engages in whole or in part in the practice of assembling or evaluating consumer credit information or other information on consumers for the purpose of furnishing consumer reports to third parties, and which uses any means or facility of interstate commerce for the purpose of preparing or furnishing consumer reports.
A consumer report is, in turn, defined as:
any written, oral, or other communication of any information by a consumer reporting agency bearing on a consumer’s credit worthiness, credit standing, credit capacity, character, general reputation, personal characteristics, or mode of living which is used or expected to be used or collected in whole or in part for the purpose of serving as a factor in establishing the consumer’s eligibility for [credit, insurance, employment or government license].Thus, if Facebook is selling information about a consumer's general reputation—trustworthiness—to third parties that might reasonably be expected to use it for credit, insurance, or employment, it's a CRA, and that means it's subject to a host of regulatory requirements as well as civil liability, including statutory damages for willful noncompliance.Facebook is hardly the only tech company that might be a CRA–I've written about this in regard to Google previously. While Facebook has a bunch of money transmitter licenses and knows it is in the consumer finance space on payments, I suspect it hasn't thought about this from the data perspective. Indeed, I don't think tech companies think about the possibility that they might be CRAs because we think of CRAs as being firms like Equifax that specialize in being CRAs, but FCRA's definition is broader. If I collect data on you that I sell to third parties for employment or insurance or credit purposes, I'm a CRA. Once one plays in consumer data, it's pretty easy to fall into the world of consumer finance regulation. Welcome to a very different Social Network, Mr. Zuckerberg.Update: Having just read Alan White's post about Thomson Reuters selling data to ICE, it makes me wonder more generally about the applicability of the FCRA to any firm that sells browsing history to parties that use it for credit, insurance, or employment. I suspect that's a more aggressive of a reading of FCRA than a court would accept, but the statutory language is pretty broad, and perhaps it gets a party to discovery. -
The Bootstrap Trap
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I just had the pleasure of reading Duke Law Professor Sara Sternberg Greene's paper The Bootstrap Trap. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the intersection of consumer credit and poverty law. The paper is chok full of good insights about the problems that arise when low-income households strive for the goal of self-sufficiency, which results in the replacement of a public welfare safety net with what Professor Sternberg Green describes as a private one of credit reporting and scoring systems. The paper shows off Professor Sternberg Greene's training in sociology with some amazing interviews, particularly about the perceived importance of credit scores in low-income consumers' lives.
Other respondents referred to their credit reports or scores as “the most important thing in my life, right now, well besides my babies,” as “that darned thing that is destroying my life,” and as “my ticket to good neighborhoods and good schools for my kids.” Many respondents believed that a “good” credit score was the key to financial stability.
One respondent, Maria, told a story about a friend who was able to improve his score. She said, “He figured out some way to get it up. Way up. I wish I knew what he did there, because I would do it. Because after that, everything was easy as pie for him. Got himself a better job, a better place to live, everything better.” Maria went to great lengths to try to improve her score so that she, too, could live a life where everything was “easy as pie.”
Credit scores have become a metric of self worth and the perceived key to success.
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Visa’s Maginot Line: Chip Cards and the Equifax Breach
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The media attention on the Equifax breach has been primarily on consumer harm. There's real consumer harm, but it's generally not direct pecuniary harm. Instead, the direct pecuniary harm from the breach will be borne by banks and merchants, and it's going to expose the move to Chip (EMV) cards in the United States without an accompanying move to PIN (as in Chip-and-PIN) to be an incredibly costly blunder by US banks. Basically, Visa, Mastercard, and Amex have built the commercial equivalent of the Maginot Line. A great line of defense against a frontal assault, and totally worthless against a flanking assault, which is what the Equifax breach will produce.
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Equifax: A Call for Public Utility Regulation of Consumer Reporting Agencies
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This post diagnoses what went wrong with Equifax and proposes a solution: a public utility regulation regime for consumer reporting agencies in which the CRAs would be restricted in their ability to pay dividends and executive compensation unless they meet certain performance metrics in terms of reporting accuracy, dispute resolution, and data security. Here goes: