So I am not one of those people that says that the government is bad and terrible and evil and can't be trusted to ever do anything. But a government agency that has all the info about all my accounts, and is a reputation agency which basically hands down major decision factors that will affect my life (can I get a car loan? a mortgage?) seems ripe for abuse. Think of how well no fly lists currently work: if your name is on that list, you are fucked. If you end up there by mistake, which apparently happens with some frequency, you have to prove that you aren't a terrorist. If your name matches the name of someone on that list, you can be fucked. I just don't have faith in a system like this.

I don't have a good solution for the recommendation system like this. Maybe we wouldn't need it in the first place if we didn't do so much debt financing of stuff. Or maybe it needs to be less centralized: applying for one loan, you need to show payment history on a few other loans, etc. But I just don't see a centralized government run agency as the solution.

> But a government agency that has all the info about all my accounts...

I'm quite happy with the approach that Switzerland has taken. Firstly, there are no credit scores or credit reports. Instead, there is a well-defined and regulated way to collect on overdue bills: The creditor requests debt collection from the state debt collection agency. At this point, collectees may decide to pay, to object to the prosecution or not to react. Objecting leads to a defined legal process where the creditor must prove the debt, and the collectee can defend themselves. In case of no reaction, authorities may proceed to seize assets.

As for the reporting, the debt collection agency will only keep a file on people against whom a collection request has been filed, and only make it available to the person in question and entities with a qualified interest in it. In practice this means that when renting a flat or getting credit, you request your own (empty) record and submit it to the landlord/bank in question. The agency is also responsible to expunge entries from that record after a defined time. And since responsibility for collection lies with a state agency, there's very little risk of the kind of harrassment you hear of in horror stories from the states.

The implementation has room for improvement: records are kept locally, tied to the state you live in and there's no immediate way to get online confirmation. Those are details though, that could be fixed in a clean implementation of the same system.

Aren't we already sort of in a worst of both worlds situation here? The IDs we are using as primary keys are from the SSA. The FHA is involved in most American's mortgage decisions. The Stafford loan program in most of America's student loans.

But we also have giant for-profit companies aggregating giant databases with little to no oversight, and up until recently no ability to access your own data for free, and still today no straightforward, across-the-board, means to appeal bad data, or collect damages from it (or from leaks of it).

Even with the terrible things associated with the no-fly list there is a TSA appeals process and a court system to challenge it. Do you know how you correct mistakes in your Equifax-TransUnion-Experian composite credit score? You mostly don't, and you most likely can't take them to court, because they think you are bound to arbitration.

I don't know if there is a good solution here either, but at least a government-run solution would have to be accountable to the people as citizens/constituents (even if it would still likely be in the pocket of the banks).

> Do you know how you correct mistakes in your Equifax-TransUnion-Experian composite credit score? You mostly don't, and you most likely can't take them to court, because they think you are bound to arbitration.

Sorry, that's not true at all. I went to Experian late last week to set up a fraud alert because of the Equifax breach, they showed me my credit report and had a button to mark things that were factually incorrect. I did so and submitted it. They did some sort of investigation and removed the data because they couldn't verify that it was correct. It was as easy as filling out an online form. (Actually, I think I had to call about 1 particular item, but it was handled over the phone.)

I was being partly hyperbolic about the worst case. Keep in mind that fixing Experian doesn't fix TransUnion or Equifax, and there's no simple way to correct all three at once.

Yeah, not with the sovereign immunity to prosecution that the gov't has.

Governments get hacked all the time. We need a new philosophy: if you can't secure it, don't even collect or store it in the first place.

I'm interested in the methods and regulations. What countries maintain credit reporting as a government function?

"In at least 40 other countries — including Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — credit reporting can be done by a public credit registry. It is usually operated by a central bank that already oversees the financial institutions that feed information into the reports. These reports tend to be more accurate because the operators have a legal right to demand data from banks as well as a mandate to ensure it’s correct and that errors are fixed. Data on late payments and defaults are erased once a consumer has settled up."

From the article.

I confess that I didn't read the article. My bad, and thanks. I am going to hit up Google and see if I can learn about the mechanism and effectiveness.

It does look, from the snippet, like they aren't quite the same. I don't yet have an opinion on that, specifically the bit about data being erased after it has been settled. That's pretty different.

I shall see what I can find. It may change my opinion. Thanks again.

OPM recently demonstrated how well the government can protect the data it collects.

So did Equifax, and Target, and Home Depot, and...

I don't see the point you're trying to make. If we're going by "who has made the news for hacks lately", the private sector is by far the worse choice.

OPM can't be sued into oblivion. The federal government gets to decide if you even have standing to sue them. What are the odds that they'll react accordingly?

If "being sued into oblivion" is such an existential threat to these corporations, why does this keep happening? Nobody is getting sued into oblivion, so I don't see why that's part of the argument. It's not "suing to destroy a corporation" vs "trying to sue the government", it's "free credit reporting and a BS 'we are REALLY sorry' letter" on both sides.

Also, OPM does not get to decide if you have standing to sue them. That's up to parts of the government so far removed from OPM they might as well be a different entity entirely.

The sentiment that a more regulated or entirely governmental entity would mitigate the risk of compromise is baseless.