How Equifax Became a Private IRS

The last time I went to rent a vehicle I got denied due to my credit (lack of, I pay cash for everything so have nothing on my credit reports).

This despite the fact that I had been renting from this _same exact place_ for years prior. I was so enraged by this I said fuck it and went and purchased the vehicle (with cash) I was planning on renting and it will be a cold day in hell before I ever rent a vehicle again. How many industries are so anti-consumer and still in business?

In many ways, covid has emboldened a lot of companies to behave in shitty ways.

There's a lot of incorrect data floating around, but then again, that's not really a problem limited to Experian (I've seen it with all credit reporting agencies), and it's not even limited to private entities. I would even say that it's less of a concern when it comes to the ramifications. About 15 years ago the police showed up at my parents' house looking for "me", and as it was a Friday evening, it took until Tuesday before it transpired, after my mother went to the courthouse in befuddlement, that due to a clerical error of some sort, somehow the LA Sheriff's Office looking to serve a failure to appear warrant on someone whose name is similar to mine but otherwise did not match my age, SSN, or anything else ended up getting served to me, and out of sheer dumb luck it happened during winter break, whereas 49 out of 52 weeks of the year I'd be 3000 miles away at school or 6000 miles away doing fieldwork. The confusion was already apparent by Monday because I spent the whole day in a holding cell with 30 other people at the courthouse and was promptly shuttled back to the Twin Towers jail with zero explanation, and it took literally Tuesday night around 11:30pm, after 3 hours of sitting on a bench, handcuffed, in silence for no discernable reason except that they can. In the interim, I did not have access to medication that I needed and quickly fell into medical distress that was entirely ignored. Luckily I didn't have a seizure, but that easily could have happened. A little bit of due diligence would have prevented this, and if I had a seizure the lawyers I consulted at the time said that I may be able to bring a claim against the sheriffs, but since I didn't, it didn't matter.

Except that I did end up going to law school, and during my internships, which was extensive (your local public defender's office can absolutely use a law student who is tech/code literate, and attorneys and judges absolutely notice when you appear every afternoon if you treat the whole endeavor as less grad school but more trade school), it turned out that data error of some sort that resulted in some sort of loss of liberty, however temporary, is common enough that I'd say between 1-2% of bond hearings involved a case of mistaken identity. Bond hearing is the first opportunity for the defendant to face a judge and while the percentage is obviously low, misdemeanor bond hearing dockets are cattle-calls and a public defender and intern would be sorting and prepping between 30 to 100 individuals (higher after holiday weekends) usually in the span of 2 hours, every single day the court is in session. I didn't go to law school in CA and the demographics are pretty dissimilar, but the sort of error and the ramifications are striking in similarity. It adds up pretty quickly.

Then leveraging my experience and language skills, I ended up moving into immigration removal defense at a private firm a few years later and as it turned out, ICE had data errors that, at least during the mid-Obama years, was even more prevalent, except immigration enforcement is administrative law, not criminal law, and federal administrative law, by virtue of its non-inclusion in the Constitution (who knew Jefferson and Madison could not literally see into the future, eh?), allowed for far more shenanigans with far fewer tangible consequences and most importantly, no entitlement to counsel except very narrow and exceptional circumstances, and in 1 circuit only (9th Cir, cases where the detained had severe mental disabilities). And then I began to see cases of US citizens, who are not subject to immigration enforcement, getting detained on administrative grounds and unable to get themselves out of the situation because administrative agencies almost never act in the capacity that places someone in non-judicial detention, except immigration enforcement (ICE/CBP, basically). Since it was not a judicial matter, there's no allegation of a crime, and without protections afforded by the Constitution or access to counsel, ICE was removing US citizens who had paperwork (that they would regard as false) and an abbreviated version of due process in immigration "court". I still don't know how they determine where to remove US citizens to, since some are native-born and some derived their citizenship from parentage, both requiring no paperwork since it doesn't involve naturalization. The US does not have a national ID system that is mandatory (non-citizens can get SSNs of course and many Americans do not have passports, and almost nobody routinely carries their birth certificate on them, which ICE routinely ignores anyway even if you manage to produce one). Immigration court proceedings do catch a number of erroneous detention cases, but we really can only rely on limited datasets to determine how many US citizens get removed to god-knows-where. Generally you'd have to make it back into the country to even make your case known to attorneys. Catholic Charities is probably the largest immigration legal service provider in terms of size and scale in this country by virtue of them being present just about everywhere and colleagues there sharing anectodal experience say that the number is "higher than anybody should be comfortable with", but there's so little transparency or accountability that the only thing that's certain is that it happens often enough that if you practice in this niche it's likely that you'll see cases, and there's very little that could be done to hold the agency accountable.

Oh, and somehow my erroneous arrest ended up requiring me to explain to the state bar even though it is not linked to any actual case since it was an actual case of mistaken identity/lack of due diligence. It might still be in the system somewhere. Although it doesn't affect me today in any meaningful way, thanks to the kafkaesque system we have, having even an erroneous record of jumping an NYC turnstile, and afaik only an NYC turnstile (unless there's a subway system elsewhere in NY state), is sufficient for a legal non-citizen to face removal proceedings, thanks to careless wording and judicial deference and intentional congressional vagueness in statutory wording and New York State's shambolic legislative system unable or willing to alter the otherwise inconsequential nomenclature of the law. Small data errors can and have literally led to the upending of lives. I guess when there's a potential Sword of Damocles hanging over just about everyone, it's almost comforting to know that most of the time database errors only lead to small inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.

> A surprising amount of money is directed by some lady in a payroll department making $40k with vlookup and 30 excel files on their desktop.

I wonder if these people understand their value to an organization.

who are the other vendors beside the actual payroll company and TWN? thx

I think people underestimate the importance of physical cash. It’s annoying, sure, but it affords a type of freedom that won’t be replaced once lost. I wish more people understood this. Sadly, most people seem willing to trade a tiny bit of convenience today for a worse future tomorrow—for example, the tipless, cash-only coffee shop on the HN front page. I guess, like smokers, people don’t believe there’ll be consequences until it’s too late.

Dick predicted all of this before many of us were even alive.

There is likely no escape from an inhuman future.

They can and always do ask you anwyways. Equifax brings a 3rd party trusted account to the table - you volunteering some info isn't helpful, they don't trust your number.

you can freeze it here... https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze

You underestimate dishonesty in the population: having your pay exposed may force your company to reduce it to the lowest common denominator to avoid all the cries by people who simply shouldnt be paid like you (age, experience, output, knowledge criticality, all these things people dont wanna hear)

Is there a way to opt out of them too?

Not sure about Equifax specifically, but yes, several of the credit agencies also sell salary info. HR departments can use to see what you earn currently before making a job offer, etc. It's awful.

The UK still retains EU data protection laws whereas the US essentially never had any.

Having lived in both countries, the American companies are totally flagrant in how they sell and abuse your personal data. Banks will sell your credit card transactions to advertisers, for example. The UK credit score was a reasonable and stable evaluation of my credit-worthiness based on data from my bank, but its American counterpart is a gamified setup that goes up and down randomly every month and is seemingly designed to make people take unnecessary debt. And so on.

The point behind the GDPR was that you own the data about yourself. And if the data is incorrect, you are able to get it corrected. In contrast, in the US, you own none of the data about yourself - many court decisions have basically ruled that whoever owns the computer (inside which the data is stored) owns that data. And if the data is wrong, only in certain limited areas (such as credit history) are you able to get it corrected. Thanks to Brexit, your country is migrating towards the US idea of data ownership.

Equifax collects data that isn't true and libels its victims by disseminating it to other parties. Having that power enshrined within the government would not be a good thing.

I could see the IRS offering some service to enter the market and compete with Equifax to bring more competition to the sector. They might have to compel Equifax to give up some data or data sources to the government and their competitors. The government did this in WW2, forcing companies to give trade secrets to their competitors so there would be a more resilient supply chain.

Something similar could be done to break up big banking if the US Postal Service allowed people to open up super simple checking and savings accounts.

This is a good idea, but I’m skeptical if the IRS has enough funding and resources to manage another service. They barely have enough funding for the current backlog of filed tax returns.

Or rather than further entrenching the idea, we could work towards effective privacy legislation and relegate all of these commercial surveillance databases to the dustbin of history.

There is no free lunch. Limiting credit checks to AGI just means everyone will assumed to have an unknown credit history and will have much higher rates.

You ready to get a mortgage at prime plus 5% instead of prime plus 1%?

But let me guess, we could create a law about that?

Having the government do things doesn’t magically mean market forces don’t apply any more.

Not to mention the dire warning on the page about making it difficult to get a new job, mortgage, or obtain access to public healthcare benefits if you don't unfreeze before applying. Typical strongman shit.

You do wonder how much further it will continue. Will everything just hit a wall soon?

Opt out ... maybe, until the next website hack.

I recently interviewed and got job offer contingent on verifying work history, etc. After I cleared that, the link for docusign arrived. I called the recruiter and asked about payroll data sharing. She claimed to have never heard of it. A day later she said they don't do that. I explained my concerns, said I won't work for a company that does not respect employee privacy, and to go ask finance and HR. Just over a week later she confirmed they don't do that and she detailed exactly what is shared and when - State new hire DB, payroll taxes, medical plan, and by court order. I thanked her and signed the agreement to work for them.

We only have a choice if we are willing to use it.

I see where you're coming from, but on the other hand, the biggest rules are well known and quite simple: If you take a loan and pay it back on time, you'll have high credit. If you fail to meet your obligations, you won't. The existence of an underclass which is constantly on the edge of not being able to pay their bills is true though.

The difference in the US financial system of credit and a "social credit" system is that these systems measure only attributes about financial credit, and in fact, the US has laws that specifically forbid many social factors from being used.

Additionally, many executives are virulently opposed to people working multiple jobs and are using things like The Work Number to identify and fire remote workers who have more than one job.

Even in our most dystopian RAND-suggested bedtime story vision of a "communist hellhole", those proles who happened to possess a ruble when they got to the front of the breadline could buy a loaf. In the supercapitalist future, all transactions will require the approval of more than the two involved parties. Good luck buying anything if you ever express skepticism toward the great and powerful credit bureaus.

It seems weird not to name Experian. Aren't there only three?

If “paying you debts” is an “invisible tome of rules” then I’m all for it.

Let’s be honest, credit score pretty accurately reflect what they are supposed to measure - credit worthiness.

I would argue it's not completely unspoken. But it's not spoken loudly enough. Pass it on.

That's why he talks about barriers to entry and market power because using those things to prevent competition is illegal. Sherman Act is actually a criminal statue that can put executives behind bars. There's also the Clayton Act and Robinson Patman act that ban forms of monopolization and price discrimination.

It's up to the courts to determine what's reasonable.

> Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize," trade or commerce. As that law has been interpreted, it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods. For the courts, a key factor in determining what is unreasonable is whether the practice has a legitimate business justification.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...