New tactic with TU....

Here's something of interest that may help. EQ are well aware of the effect of not reporting credit limits on people's reports.

EQUIFAX Position Paper- The Importance of Reporting High Balance and Credit Limit Information
In November 1998, a large national bankcard issuer informed Equifax that it would stop reporting credit limit and high balance information. In addition, within the six months, a few bankcard issuers have implemented or announced their intent to implement a policy of non-reporting of credit limit and high balance information. Recognizing the effect that such a policy, if adopted by other creditors, would have on credit products, Equifax began an intensive study to determine the scope and impact of this trend.

While the non-reporting of credit limit and high balance is intended to prevent competitors from using this data in marketing campaigns designed to target these lenderâ??s best-performing customers, it presents a significant challenge to Equifax and companies that rely on credit scoring in their lending process. This information is used to by Equifax and other model developers to determine credit utilization, an attribute commonly used in credit scoring model development. Equifax anticipates if this trend in non-reporting of key credit data evolves, it will continue to have a noticeable impact on the performance of both custom and generic credit scoring tools.

The analysis presented in this position paper is the first phase in an ongoing study to determine the impact of non-reporting on scoring products. Future studies will examine the effect of varying levels of non-reporting on different types of models (targeting, recovery, fraud, etc). In addition, we will examine the impact on the scoring of credit files with varying numbers of tradelines and tradeline age. Consistent with the Association of Credit Bureaus and other credit reporting organizations, Equifax encourages all lenders to continue reporting credit limit and high balance information. Given the clear impact on the performance of our models, Equifax
recommends that lenders regularly validate both custom and generic credit scoring tools using their portfolio data to determine the actual impact of this non-reporting policy on their portfolio as well as to identify normal shifts in score performance.

Equifax Use of Credit Limit and High Balance in Model Development
Credit scoring is a widely used statistical method of predicting future credit performance of individual consumers based upon their historical credit performance. Since credit scoring models are built using a wide variety of credit file attributes like credit limit and high balance, credit scores are dependent on the data available to the model developer.

Credit limit and high balance information is used in the creation of â??utilizationâ? attributes, which are used extensively in the development of credit risk, targeting, recovery and fraud models. Equifax incorporates utilization data into approximately 15 to 20 percent of the attributes used in generic and custom model development, making it an important
characteristic for behavior prediction.

Currently, Equifax models use credit limit when calculating utilization. When Equifax encounters a tradeline with a missing or non-reported credit limit and high balance value, the model replaces it with the current balance value in utilization calculations. If the current balance value is missing, then the model bypasses that trade in calculating utilization.

You can see the rest of the study here:
http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cach...dit.pdf+equifax+position+paper&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

I can't get the link to the pdf file so if you want to download it as pdf, just go to google and search for "equifax position paper" and it will be the first one coming up.

 

Well, i did need them but that is almost over. I will be dumping them around Feb.