Credit reporting company Equifax is facing serious blowback after it admitted that a “coding error” sent lenders erroneous credit scores for millions of consumers.
Out of the millions impacted by the mistake, some 300,000 consumers’ credit scores were off by 25 points from where they should have been. Equifax noted that those consumers were in the minority and only represent about 12% of all the credit scores released from March 17 to April 6.
The company said it’s been working with customers affected by the error, but officials did not go into specific details about how those issues would be fixed to rebalance the credit scores of those consumers.
“Obviously any data quality issue is a big issue for us. We take it very seriously, and it's one we are going to make sure we are going to fix," the agency stated.
Altering credit decisions
Twenty-five points might not seem like that much, but it's enough to push a score from "good" to "fair" -- and a "fair" credit score could cost consumers hundreds of dollars when applying for things like home mortgages.
“We know that businesses and consumers depend on our data, and Equifax takes this technology coding issue very seriously. For those consumers that did experience a score shift, initial analysis indicates that only a small number of them may have received a different credit decision,” Equifax stated.
Equifax said it’s on track to move an additional 30% of Equifax environments to the new Equifax Cloud by the end of 2022. Officials say that should provide a better infrastructure with “better detective and preventive controls, which will be positive for both customers and consumers.”