Consumer Financial Protection Bureau orders Equifax to pay USD 15 million for improper credit report dispute investigations

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued an order against Equifax for failing to conduct proper investigations of consumer disputes and to assure maximum possible accuracy of information in consumer reports. The order requires Equifax to bring its dispute-handling and credit reporting practices into compliance with federal law and to pay a USD 15 million civil money penalty to be deposited into the CFPB’s victims relief fund. The CFPB found that Equifax ignored consumer documents and other evidence submitted with disputes, allowed previously deleted inaccuracies to be reinserted into credit reports, and sent consumers confusing or conflicting investigation-result letters. The Bureau also cited ineffective systems and processes that excessively deferred to furnishers’ responses, a lack of controls to prevent reappearance of removed information and to block information resulting from identity theft, and software coding errors that led to miscalculated and shared inaccurate credit scores for several hundred thousand consumers and duplicate reporting of the same credit accounts for more than 50,000 consumers; Equifax processes approximately 765,000 disputes per month.