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Comment by rixrax | Hacker News Reader

This may sound controversial, but politicians should also limit credit reporting agencies to finite, fixed number of players. Like two or maximum three.

Sometime after Equifax hack, I froze our credit on TransUnion, Experian and Equifax. But wasn't aware that e.g. Innovis exists.

So ok, I will now go there to put a freeze in place. But now that I realized there maybe other CRAs, DDG tells me I should maybe do something about FICO[1] and PRBC[2] too.

Or of course we could do the smart thing, and tell our elected representatives to work towards abolishing/repealing whole CRA industry. I'd wager that what ever rises from those ashes, could not possibly be the horror CRA industry is today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FICO [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRBC

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I hadn't heard of Innovis either until I read the New York Times article encouraging everyone to freeze their credit:

Christina Bater, managing director at Barrett Asset Management in New York, suggests freezing your file at the little-known company Innovis, too. Hey, why not?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/your-money/identity-theft...

Innovis Credit Freeze Online Link: https://www.innovis.com/securityFreeze/index

I don't think that is controversial. It makes sense to me.

My ideas are likely more controversial, though:

I think building and maintaining credit should be transparent. No secret formulas.

I think it should be possible to build credit simply by paying your bills and rent on time, possibly adding some money saved as well. Living well within your means doesn't build credit and it should.

One should have to report people's credit to all credit agencies. This process should be simple, and ideally handled by a government clearinghouse or other agency that the credit agencies split the costs for. This does make more than one agency somewhat redundant, but I think for the American landscape it is a better option than simply using the one agency for everything.

And lastly, I think we should require companies to report timely payments if they report untimely payments. Otherwise, even those accounts going to collections cannot be reported as bad debt. This helps the previous point about being able to build good credit simply by living within your means possible, yet lets folks that have never paid a bill have zero credit.

Seems to me like it would be better to require an opt in from the person having their data harvested so that bad actors could more easily be punished by the market, and to incentivize passing value from the data collection to the person on whom it is being collected.

If when a bank gives false statements (what is Owellianly called identify theft) to the credit agencies, this should be highly punished and the problems we are having with leaking true information about people would go away.

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