Their business is to aggregate what others have told them. It's consensus + automation at its purest. If you have a lot of different companies saying you've bee

Their business is to aggregate what others have told them. It's consensus + automation at its purest. If you have a lot of different companies saying you've been a good boy for a long time, you get a high score. If a couple companies say you're garbage (true or not) you get a bad score. The agencies simply aggregate this information. I guess a lender could cut out the middleman and call each of your previous lenders themselves, but who's to say the result wouldn't be the same (+ the added cost of having to do that). Conceptually I have no disagreement with you, and I'm certainly no reporting agency apologist. I spent a lot of time on my own report correcting an unfortunate combination of youthful indiscretion and erroneous reporting and I guess I realized that the rage is wasted. There's just no one place to pin the blame, the whole thing is a complex system (intentionally) with perverse incentives (intentionally) and you can either play the game or resign yourself to a life of credit denials. I hate it too, but I can't see a better way that serves the same scope and scale at the same price. The only place to fight, I think, is 1) for better corrections process, and 2) penalties for companies that incorrectly report.