DMV can't afford the kind of external auditing that would've caught this. Not with their current budget. Setting aside taxes etc, what do you propose a public service organization should do in these situations other than trust a company to do what they're saying?
edit: removed a statement distracting from the two questions.
Why should we set aside taxes? Texas is allergic to taxes and the state government loves to keep itself running on a shoestring budget, but as we can see here, that's just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Adequate funding to run a proper audit and risk management program is definitely the way to go.
Yeah it might be distracting from the two questions I did ask. I'll remove the statement because it seems to ruffle some political feathers.
It wasn't intended politically, but rather to say the tax situation is a known quantity already which is why the second question asked to set that aside before answering.
If lenders are held liable for Equifax/TransUnion/etc breaches, they will stop sharing information about debtors, leading to more expensive credit/a freezing of consumer lending.
It wasn’t so long ago that credit card companies would just send out cards to everyone in a postal code, the idea was you had to return it if you didn’t want it, or they assumed you did and charged you the annual fee. Or you accept the fee and start using the card. It took an act of congress to stop them from doing that.
Around that same time the credit card companies were also getting a lot of flack for issuing cards to newborns, pets, and the deceased. That also took an act of congress to stop.
The US credit agencies themselves are only a few decades old, people have been borrowing and lending for a bit longer then that - you can read about it in the Old Testament.
On the contrary, this year credit scores have been rising and interest rates falling despite borrowers, in reality, being at a greater risk of default today than maybe any other time since 2008.
Maybe the real service provided by the credit data sharing is how data is used almost everywhere in reality: marketing?
I suspect their basic service is to outsource responsibility.
If each lender does their own due diligence and risk ranking, any lender that has an above average failure rate will take a lot of flack from their investors and regulators.
If they say "We use the same scoring formulas and credit files as everyone else", they can push the blame back to the bureaus.
