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In May 2022, the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis sent letters to the nationwide credit bureau, “probing how [the companies] handled consumer complaints about errors on their credit reports during the pandemic.” This, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Documents:

As reported by the WSJ,

In the letters, the lawmakers said payment-deferment programs and an increase in identity theft during the pandemic created new ways for errors to get added onto credit reports. The letters, signed by South Carolina Democrat James Clyburn, the subcommittee’s chairman, ask the companies to provide documents about how they handle responses to complaints.

. . .

The credit-reporting companies made “changes to their complaint response processes early in the crisis that predictably resulted in a significant decrease in responsiveness,” the letters say. That included using automated reviews to identify complaints suspected of having been submitted by a third party and using this as a reason to dismiss complaints, according to the letters.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is separately investigating how Equifax, Experian and TransUnion handle consumer disputes, the Journal previously reported.

. . .

Credit-reporting companies are closing consumer complaints faster and are offering less relief, the CFPB said in a January report based on a review of its complaints database. The credit-reporting companies told the CFPB that they provided relief on less than 2% of complaints that consumers sent to the regulator in 2021 about incomplete or erroneous information on their credit reports. That was down from nearly 25% in 2019, the CFPB said.