Credit rating Company Equifax has been accused of providing inaccurate credit scores on millions of consumers who are looking to re finance mortgages or simply obtain credit, an investigation in Australia reveals a similar issue locally.
The problem that emerged in the USA is also happening in Australia where reports supplied to Australian banks are inaccurate.
According to Bloomberg, Equifax sent the erroneous scores on people applying for auto loans, mortgages and credit cards to banks and nonbank lenders.
The scores were sometimes off by 20 points or more in either direction, the people said, enough to alter the interest rates consumers were offered or to result in their applications being rejected altogether.
The inaccurate scores were sent from mid-March through early April, the people said.
The company began disclosing the errors to lenders in May, they said.
In Australia Equifax recently put themselves up as experts in Cybercrime.
The US business that supplies reports to leading banks in Australia as well as mortgage lenders recently put together a panel of cybersecurity experts from Australian business community to have a critical discussion on global and local best practices to help protect organisations from security threats.
This is despite their own servers being hacked.
When the Company finally came clean on the cyber hack Equifax revealed that the sensitive personal information of 143 million listed individuals had been compromised—a number the company later revised up to 147.9 million. Names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, all gone in an unprecedented hit on the rating agencies servers.
Recently the business in Australia released the Equifax Red Paper which examines the human face of the problem facing businesses in particular retailers in Australia.
Equifax said it has since fixed their latest error, which the company described as a “technology coding issue.”
The glitch didn’t alter the information in consumers’ credit reports, the company said.
“We have determined that there was no shift in the vast majority of scores during the three-week timeframe of the issue,” Sid Singh, president of Equifax’s U.S. Information Solutions, said in a statement.