Federal Report or Study

This December 2014 CFPB report describes characteristics of the medical and non-medical collections tradelines on consumers’ credit reports and the processes by which they appear and disappear. 19.5% of consumers with credit reports have one or more medical collections tradelines and 24.5%. contain one or more non-medical tradelines. 80% of tradelines that can be attributed to a particular creditor or provider are reported on accounts that originated with a healthcare provider, utility company, or telecommunications company. Most collections tradelines are for small amounts.

This May 2014 CFPB report considers the reporting of unpaid medical bills, where 99.4% of this information is reported to the national CRAs by collection agencies. Credit scoring models generally do not differentiate between medical collections and the other debts. VantageScore 3.0, excludes paid collections, but earlier versions treated paid and unpaid collections equally. The CFPB examination found that medical debt was less predictive of credit risk than non-medical collections, and that paid medical debt was less predictive than unpaid medical debt.

This December 2012 CFPB study describes the credit reporting infrastructure at the three largest nationwide consumer reporting agencies (NCRAs) to collect, compile, and report information about consumers. Most furnishers provide consumer credit information electronically to one or more NCRAs using a standardized format called Metro 2.

This September 2012 CFPB report analyzes the differences between credit reports obtained by creditors and those obtained by consumers. CFPB analyzed credit scores from 200,000 credit files from each of the three major nationwide CRAs. The CFPB found that for a majority of consumers the scores produced by different scoring models provided similar information about the relative creditworthiness of the consumers. For a substantial minority, however, different scoring models gave meaningfully different results.

Report to Congress Under Section 319 of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003