Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has asked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to issue a temporary moratorium to prevent Equifax from sending credit scores to financial institutions following its acknowledgement that it sent out inaccurate credit scores earlier this year.
“I intend to utilize all tools available to me as chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee to ensure harmed consumers are promptly made whole and to protect consumers from our broken consumer credit reporting system going forward. I urge you to do the same,” Waters wrote in a letter to the CFPB. “I urge you […] to utilize your authority as director to impose a moratorium on Equifax providing any credit scores to financial institutions until they can demonstrate to your satisfaction that they have the necessary systems and controls to ensure each credit score they provide on millions of consumers is verified to be accurate before distributing them to financial institutions.”
Waters also sent a letter to Equifax and the CEOs of some of the largest commercial banks, demanding answers explaining how the delivery of erroneous credit scores occurred, the scale of consumers affected and the steps these institutions are taking to remediate harm to customers and ensure accurate credit reporting moving forward.
“I am alarmed at recent news reporting that for potentially millions of consumers, your company provided inaccurate credit scores to numerous financial institutions relating to their credit applications,” Waters wrote. “…this incident comes five years after your company announced one of the largest data breaches in the history of our country, exposing the personal information of more than 147 million individuals, which I invited you to testify before the House Financial Services Committee in 2019 to discuss. That incident, along with this recent episode and a litany of research, studies and testimony demonstrating how broken our consumer credit reporting system is, all underscore the urgent need for CFPB and Congress to strengthen consumer protections in this area.”
Following this event, and a significant data breach that Equifax experienced in 2017, Waters has pushed legislation to create greater oversight and accountability for credit reporting bureaus.