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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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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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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Full Utility Credit Reporting: Risks to Low Income Consumers
A research consultant has recently produced several reports promoting utility company reporting of all customer payment behaviors and transactions to the major consumer reporting agencies (CRAs). Proponents of full utility reporting contend that it is required to help “thin file” and “no file” consumers to build credit history and gain access to bank loans and…
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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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Automated Injustice Redux: Ten Years After a Key Report, Consumers Are Still Frustrated Trying to Fix Credit Reporting Errors
Ten years ago, the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) issued Automated Injustice: How a Mechanized Dispute System Frustrates Consumers Seeking to Fix Errors in their Credit Reports, the landmark report on the serious dysfunctions in the American credit reporting system. Since then, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) began exercising supervision authority over the Big…
