Forget the Illuminati: Credit bureaus are the real shadowy cabal secretly making decisions that could affect the rest of your life. And they’re not even good at it, as John Oliver illuminated (sorry) in last night’s roundup of the previous week’s news on Last Week Tonight:
Aside from the absurdity of credit reports being used to determine a candidate’s hirability—a concept even the director of government relations of Transunion admits has no basis in statistical fact—Oliver’s report highlights the damage that can be done when credit bureaus and independent background check companies accidentally saddle consumers with other people’s debt and/or criminal records, something that happens more often than you think. Naturally, it’s a Kafkaesque nightmare to fix these errors, and it has been for decades.
Oliver’s response to this quagmire is to create three “shitty companies”—Equifacks, Experianne, and Tramsonion—with names that are not quite the same as those of the three major credit bureaus, but close enough. Because close enough is good enough when it comes to mistaking your company for one that slings orca meat. Right, Transunion?