Cracking the Code: Understanding and Overcoming Language Barriers in Consumer Finance
This report covers the ways that financial institutions across the financial services industry serve, or fail to serve, people with limited English proficiency.
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"What the Heck, Dude!": How States Can Fight Rental Housing Junk Fees
This companion report to Too Damn High focuses on steps that state and local governments and advocates can take to address junk fees.
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Digital Denials: How Abuse, Bias, and Lack of Transparency in Tenant Screening Harm Renters
Landlords in the United States almost always engage in some form of screening of rental applicants. This screening often involves reports or scores purchased from specialized tenant screening consumer reporting agencies (CRAs). The reports typically combine information about eviction filings, criminal records, and credit history. Often the reports include a score or recommendation based on these records, and in some cases, this score or recommendation is the only information conveyed to the landlord.
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Too Damn High: How Junk Fees Add to Skyrocketing Rents
Junk fees jeopardize access to future housing and financial stability by contributing to rental debt that leads to negative marks on credit reports.
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Don’t Add Further Insult to Injury: Medical Debt & Credit Reports
UPDATE – July 2025 Since this report was published in January 2023, a number of states have passed legislation prohibiting credit reporting of medical debts. The CFPB also issued a Fair Credit Reporting Act regulation to prohibit medical credit reporting nationwide that was subsequently overturned by a court decision. These developments are discussed in…
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Automated Injustice: How a Mechanized Dispute System Frustrates Consumers Seeking to Fix Errors in Their Credit Reports
Inaccuracies and errors plague the credit reporting systems. Estimates of serious errors range from 3% to 25%. Even using a low-end estimate, which is from the credit reporting industry and included only a narrow subset of problems, 6 million Americans face serious errors in their reports that could result in a denial of credit.
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Solving the Credit Conundrum: Helping Consumers’ Credit Records Impaired by the Foreclosure Crisis and Great Recession
The foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s left an enormous trail of economic destruction in its wake. Most Americans are familiar with the obvious damage — the crisis cost nearly $200 billion in lost wealth, resulted in over 4.5 million Americans losing their homes,2 and triggered the worst recession since the Great Depression. One long-term…
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Credit Scoring and Insurance: Costing Consumers Billions and Perpetuating the Economic Racial Divide
The use of credit scores in home and auto insurance is a poorly understood phenomenon with a huge economic impact on Americans. It’s also a practice that creates wide racial disparities. This report presents an overview of credit scores, which are three digit numbers designed to predict risk based on a consumer’s credit record. The…
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Paper Statements: An Important Consumer Protection
Electronic statements sound eco-friendly, but they are not for everyone. Bank account, credit card and mortgage statements provide important information and serve a critical consumer protection function. Consumers must have the right to receive that information in the manner that works for them. For many consumers, from those without regular broadband Internet access to the…
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Account Screening Consumer Reporting Agencies: a Banking Access Perspective
Access to safe and affordable financial products and services is a cornerstone of financial empowerment: this access allows consumers to secure their income and build and grow their assets. However, there are almost 17 million unbanked Americans who do not have bank accounts. These consumers incur higher costs — estimated at up to $40,000 over a lifetime — by using alternative financial services, sometimes predatory, to handle their routine transactions, and often are not able to take advantage of savings and asset building opportunities.
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Don't Add Insult to Injury: Medical Debt & Credit Reports
Expenses for life-saving or medically necessary care are often unexpected, and can throw a family into an immediate financial crisis. This crisis is compounded when families cannot pay for these surprise expenses and the debt is reported to credit bureaus. The blemishes on a credit report (which employers and landlords as well as creditors may…
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Mission Creep: a Primer on Use of Credit Reports & Scores for Non-Credit Purposes
This white paper provides an overview of the most significant uses of credit reports and credit scores for purposes other than credit underwriting. These non-credit uses include: Employment, Rental housing, Insurance, and others.
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