There have been a lot of congressional hearings on the FCRA by the House Committe on Financial Services lately. You can read the full testimonies of various organizations on specific issues. CRA's, CRA trade organizations, consumer advocate groups, banks, and various other groups/individuals have recently been offering testimony on the FCRA. Seems to me like each organization, including consumer advocates, cra's, and creditors are to trying to protect their own interests in the FCRA. Their home page is: http://financialservices.house.gov/index.asp If you click on hearings and highlight Legislative Hearing on H.R. 2622, you can read all the testimony involved. The hearings of the subcommittee that deal with credit (mostly) are: http://financialservices.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=all&comm=3
Here is the Evil Exp's testimony on Identity Theft and how helpful they are in this area, uh-huh. http://financialservices.house.gov/media/pdf/062403ll.pdf Basically they try to disuade congress from "free reports" for suspected ID theft, of course, they make too much $$$ selling their reports to paranoid consumers. They actually suggest one way for consumer's to prevent ID theft is to subscribe to their online reporting services. While this might be helpful in preventing ID theft, EXP makes a substantial profit from this. Throughout Evil Exp's testimony, they continually point out the negatives to a free report. Then they go on to list their case studies where such and such creditor implemented EXP's Id theft program and ID theft has been greatly reduced. Of course, I wander how much $$ the creditor has to pay for this program. The only people that get left out in the cold with ID theft are consumers and businesses, but the CRA's are all increasing their incomes from this and doing their best to prevent the issuance of free reports.
