United States
In the United States, the legal term for a credit bureau under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) is consumer reporting agency — often abbreviated in the industry as CRA.
In the United States, key credit bureau consumer protections and general rules or governing guidelines for both the credit bureaus and data furnishers are the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA), and Regulation B.
Two government bodies share responsibility for the oversight of credit bureaus and those that furnish data to them. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has oversight for the consumer credit bureaus. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks with regard to the data they furnish credit bureaus.
Most U.S. consumer credit information is collected and kept by the four national credit reporting agencies: Experian (formerly TRW Information Systems & Services and the CCN Group), Equifax, TransUnion, and Innovis (which was purchased from First Data Corporation in 1999 by CBC Companies). These organizations are for-profit businesses and possess no government affiliation. Though they are competitors, they have formed a trade organization called the Consumer Data Industry Association (CDIA) to establish reporting standards and lobby on behalf of their industry issues in Washington. Current reporting standards accepted by the four U.S. CRAs are Metro and Metro2. The Metro2 standard is defined in the annual CDIA publication, the Credit Reporting Resource Guide. Consumers are entitled to a free annual credit report from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Consumers can go to annualcreditreport.com, the Internet site maintained by the three companies, to get their free report.
There are dozens of other similar information collection and reporting firms that analyze and sell information about consumers for other purposes, including those who aggregate multiple credit data sources and provide lenders with customized analytical tools.
PRBC (Payment Reporting Builds Credit, Inc.) is a national alternative credit bureau. Incorporated in March 2002, PRBC enables consumers to self-enroll and build a positive credit file by reporting their on-time payments (such as rent, utilities, cable, and phone) that are not automatically reported to the three traditional credit bureaus.
In the U.S., there are six business or commercial bureau repositories (in alphabetical order): Cortera, Dun & Bradstreet, Experian Business, Equifax Small Business Financial Exchange (SBFE), PayNet, and Southeastern Association of Credit Management (SACM).
Read more about this topic: Credit Bureau
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The United States is a republic, and a republic is a state in which the people are the boss. That means us. And if the big shots in Washington don’t do like we vote, we don’t vote for them, by golly, no more.”
—Willis Goldbeck (1900–1979)
“Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)