What can Congress do about the Equifax credit crisis?

The recent new that the credit agency Equifax was hacked and let 143 million individual accounts in the U.S. be compromised means after weeding out children and those who have no credit that everyone’s account is at risk. It’s not short lived either because individuals can not change their social security numbers much less their date of birth and other corresponding data which vets their rating. It’s a credit crisis that requires a resolution.  Many will contact their Congressman, actually I did, and ask for government to just do something.

Upon reflection the problem is one of Governing the Commons. The Commons being public grasslands which were overused and abused by farmers who let their livestock eat everything because their was no ownership to promote sustainable grazing. Equifax is one of those careless farmers who has no regard for people’s credit because they gather big data and sell the information to creditors. So creditors are the customers whose only recourse is to drop one and use another. Equifax will be abandoned and probably be litigated out of business as it’s difficult to believe they have any friends left. Nevertheless what can Congress do about this credit crisis?

A simple suggestion would be to require every creditor to give the consumer the choice of credit agency to vet their application.  Let the consumer see three agencies: Experian, Transunion and Innovis to substitute Equifax, listed with a check box next to each name.  Have it be a prominent part of the weasel word section and requiring the consumer mark it and initial the marking so they get some ownership control over their identity.  Whichever one is selected is then contracted by the creditor to supply the information. With this simple change credit agencies will consider consumers as their customer so that one can envision television commercials from Transunion or Experian much like Visa or Mastercharge does to promote the use of their cards. While the service is free to consumers the agencies can upsell sell their services and security features. The positive from this change is that it will make the industry much more attentive to those whose history has been taken over by criminals, something which none of the majors has been great about and it should drive Equifax out of business.