Elizabeth Sheppard is skilled in resolving people’s economic mess. But for almost a year, the Colorado officer has been unable to resolve a glaring mistake on her own credit report.
Due to a$ 240, 000 student loan debt she doesn’t owe, her credit score dropped almost 85 points. She repeatedly asked the government’s big three credit reporting companies to correct the mistake, submitting evidence showing the bill belonged to her ex-husband. Yet the borrower’s account manager came back and said she wasn’t at fault.
However, the credit bureaus refused to remove it, jeopardizing her plans to move with her crippled father into a more accessible home. She said,” There’s no way in the world I could qualify for the purchase.”
Sheppard should have been able to count on the federal government to force the credit bureaus to get her debate significantly. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has used the threat of sanctions and claims for years to pressure businesses into fixing errors and engaging with consumers. Under the Biden administration, a comprehensive supporter of the firm, consumers ‘ levels of comfort for such issues rose to about 10 times as high as in 2020.
Sheppard was in need of assistance from the Trump presidency, which has severely restricted the CFPB’s activities, including surveillance of credit bureaus. With the firm weakened, two of the three major credit bureaus, TransUnion and Experian, have sharply reduced the share of consumer grievances they resolved in customers ‘ favor, according to a ProPublica examination of federal complaint information.
In the summer of 2025, Trans Union’s relief rate began to decline, which had been largely unchanged for a while. By October it was providing comfort about half as often.
Experian’s decline was even more serious. In 2024, the company resolved nearly 20 % of customer complaints in their favor. Last year, that number fell to less than 1 %.
The second key commission, Equifax, did not show a similar decrease. The firm entered a consent order with the CFPB just days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated over poor debate and investigation procedures. Under the deal, the organization committed to measures and continuous monitoring.
Customer relief from Equifax largely matched complaints.
The timing of the falls at TransUnion and Experian coincides with the Trump administration’s destroying of the CFPB.
Russell Vought, a White House official who oversaw extensive budget cuts across national authorities, assumed command of the CFPB as acting director in February 2025. He immediately ordered a cease to practically all agency work. Under his leadership, the CFPB has attempted to fire the majority of its employees, halted studies, and halted police activities, including those against Trans Union. One of the CFPB’s fresh attorneys leading the selloff on police represented Experian for decades before joining the management.
The National Consumer Law Center, which is a plaintiff in a lawsuit that has so far blocked some of the government’s breaking work, said Chi Chi Wu, director of consumer reporting at the National Consumer Law Center.
” The thing that is making them do any kind of work is a lawsuit or a regulation, and now we don’t have the regulator”, Wu said.
According to the credit bureaus, many issues are illegal, including some filed by credit repair companies that charge clients to issue negative information on their reports, according to statements to ProPublica. Experian said in a statement that some of those companies “mislead consumers into believing they can remove correct knowledge”, adding that it investigates” all reasonable” problems. The business did not respond to certain inquiries regarding its comfort decline.
Third parties are allowed to post complaints on behalf of consumers if they share their role and get permission. Federal regulators have acknowledged that there are bad actors, but the CFPB and a House subcommittee found that the credit bureaus ‘ methods for identifying third-party involvement were overly broad and dismissed legitimate concerns.
Asked about the decline in relief, TransUnion said it recently changed its processes to handle third-party complaints and now redirects those with insufficient documentation to” a more appropriate” internal channel for review.
The CFPB’s complaint system has been a public middleman for years, sending consumer complaints to bureaus, collecting responses, and publishing information on how businesses responded to them.
But the companies have successfully lobbied the Trump administration to start steering some consumers away from the transparent process and toward their internal systems.
A CFPB spokeswoman said the complaint system was flooded with submissions from third-party credit repair companies and that the organization was working to address this so that legitimate customers can get assistance more effectively. The agency did not respond to written questions about the decline in relief or enforcement.
When using the internal systems of the credit bureaus, how many consumers receive assistance or not is not known. But CFPB data shows that since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, more than 2.7 million credit reporting complaints submitted to the CFPB have gone without relief, leaving some people at risk of being denied loans, housing or employment and subject to higher rates from insurers and lenders.
A Texan who claimed a fraudulent account remained on their credit report despite their disputes made one anonymous complaint. ” I have an important deal that I need to complete that is important for the safety and survival of my family”, the person wrote. Equifax provided relief, according to CFPB records, while TransUnion and Experian did not.
Also among those who complained was an Air Force veteran and elections organizer in Arkansas who said the bureaus refused to restore his erroneously deleted mortgage history. Kwami Abdul-Bey, a man who was interviewed by ProPublica, claimed the error prevented him from refinancing his car or home despite speaking with several lenders.
” Each time they tell me that I do not have enough years of credit. Before that trade line vanished, he claimed,” I was paying on that mortgage for ten years”.
After ProPublica contacted his mortgage servicer, Wells Fargo, the company reached out to Abdul-Bey to apologize for his situation and said it would investigate.
Equifax and Experian did not respond to inquiries about individual customers who complained. TransUnion declined to comment on individual situations but said in a statement that the company “has multiple resources available to consumers to help with every step of the dispute process”.
Americans today have the right to have their financial information collected and sold by credit bureaus. Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1970, giving consumers the right to flag errors. However, the credit bureaus have used a small number of workers, often from abroad, to handle a lot of investigations more recently.
Trans Union, for example, had 171 workers responding to consumer disputes covering 38 million line items in 2021. A TransUnion spokesman declined to provide a number despite stating in an email that the business has since added staff.
” These’ investigators,’ they have a stack of disputes like a mile high that they have to go through every day”, said Liam Hayden, a Chicago attorney who has represented consumers in credit reporting cases. A true, authentic investigation costs money, it is said.
After the 2008 financial crisis, Congress created the CFPB to protect Americans from unfair and abusive practices. The Big Three Credit Bureaus ‘ complaint system by 2015 was the most frequently received by the agency.
Credit Reporting Complaints About the Three Major Credit Bureaus Have Surged in Recent Years
For matters like credit cards, loans, or debt collection, complaints about Equifax, Trans Union, and Experian far outnumber all other complaints.
The CFPB released a critical report in 2022, along with recommendations for how businesses can address” shoddy investigation practices” and identified a lack of responsiveness by credit bureaus to consumer issues. Over the next few years, relief rates rose as the companies provided more individualized responses to complaints filed through the agency.
Since 2015, the CFPB has filed a dozen enforcement actions against consumer reporting companies according to a list of announcements on its website.
Just days before Trump took office, the CFPB announced an enforcement action against Equifax. The business settled, agreeing to pay$ 15 million, and continue to operate under a legally binding consent order designed to resolve the dispute.
Among the reforms, the company agreed to improve its web interface for submitting disputes, avoid relying on faulty information from creditors and not automatically dismiss repeated concerns from the same consumer. The company’s handling of CFPB complaints was not specifically mentioned in the agreement. Equifax was given about a year to put many of the changes in place and has to remain compliant for five years after.
ProPublica discovered that the organization had authorized a similar proceeding against TransUnion in July of 2024, but it was never brought. Settlement talks ended shortly after the change in administration.
In a February 2025 Securities and Exchange Commission filing, TransUnion wrote in a letter to the CFPB that “gives recent changes in the CFPB leadership, our engagement with the organization on this matter has paused.” ” We cannot provide an estimate of when, or if, such engagement will resume”.
The CFPB dropped a lawsuit against TransUnion and a former executive over alleged deceptive practices that the CFPB had in place that month. TransUnion denied the allegations, calling them “meritless”. Later, the CFPB terminated an agreement intended to remedy the business’s delay in implementing and removing credit freezes.
The CFPB sued Experian shortly before the administration changed, alleging failures in its dispute handling processes. Experienc has denied the allegations in court, called the lawsuit” completely without merit” and said the company thoroughly investigates “every consumer dispute.”
The Experian case remains active. A CFPB spokesperson said that Victoria Dorfman, the new senior legal advisor who previously represented Experian, has recused herself from the case.
In a July public comment letter, Experian argued it should not be required to respond to individual CFPB complaints and that the vast majority of those filed recently are illegitimate. The Consumer Data Industry Association, the industry’s lobbying arm, has urged the CFPB to turn the complaints system into a private space and direct more customers away from it.
This year, just a week after receiving a letter from the lobbying group, the CFPB added three notices for consumers to click through before filing a public complaint, warning them that their requests might be ignored if they have not already disputed issues directly with credit bureaus — a standard the agency previously said companies cannot reliably verify.
The CDIA pointed out in a statement to ProPublica that a notice directing users to first file a complaint directly had been present in the CFPB complaint portal for a while in 2012. The new changes are “necessary to address the widespread misuse of the portal” that divert resources away from legitimate concerns, the group said.
But consumer advocates contend that the industry-friendly changes present even more obstacles for consumers like Sheppard who are trying to get their issues resolved.
She twice directly railed against the student loan error with the bureaus. Then in June, she turned to the CFPB. All three responded that they had verified that the debt was hers without addressing the evidence she had provided.
In December, she sent another dispute by certified mail, but TransUnion replied with a postcard stating it believed the submission had not come from her.
Sheppard remarked,” They didn’t even try.” ” The fact that they sent that little postcard was just ridiculous”.
Sheppard’s situation was not addressed to Trans Union, but it stated in a statement that it” cannot change information provided to us without sufficient documentation and clear instructions from the consumer.”
In her mailed dispute, Sheppard included a letter she received from the loan account manager stating that she was not responsible for the debt.
Sheppard sued the three credit bureaus in January without having any other options. The companies have not yet responded in court.
Without a functioning CFPB, enforcement may fall under the purview of state attorneys general and private lawsuits. The Federal Trade Commission can bring cases but lacks the authority to conduct routine supervision.
Consumers will become more and more trapped if there is no CFPB, according to Hayden, a Chicago attorney. ” In five years, the resolution of consumer disputes is going to be worse, credit reports are going to be worse and it’s going to be harder for folks to fix them, guaranteed”.
Credit Bureaus Are Making More Mistakes About Consumer Reports Under Trump’s CFPB, the first article appeared on ProPublica.
