Give us (pounds) 2 and we'll tell you nothing?

Sunday Herald, The, Oct 28, 2001 by Teresa Hunter

DOES anyone know how you get a response out of Equifax, the Glasgow-based credit refusal agency? It is one of two large companies in Britain which distribute information about our financial affairs to banks when we apply for new accounts or loan.

Did I say credit refusal agency? How careless. I, of course, meant credit reference agency or CRA. These bodies have no role to play at all in whether we can get credit or not, as they will emphatically point out, in the unlikely event you can get to speak to one.

Applying for a bank account, credit card or loan can be a very frustrating affair, as the deluge of emails I receive each week from readers makes clear. Many people, who consider themselves a good risk, are left bewildered, hurt and dejected when they are turned down.

Even more infuriating is the fact that banks don't have to tell you why you are not their sort of customer, although they are likely to obliquely imply that they discovered something distasteful about you when they checked with the CRA. These are the agencies, you will remember, who play no role in deciding whether or not we get credit, (anyone not paying attention should go back to the beginning).

You do have a legal right to check what information is held on your file, which might have lead to the rejection. It's all very simple. You send off (pounds) 2, and within seven days all should be revealed. That's what the law says.

But as we all know, the law is an ass. Several e-mails I have received from readers since I last wrote about Equifax indicate that their (pounds) 2 cheques were met by a wall of stony silence.

One reader has been trying for a year to query his and his son's file after his offspring was turned down by the Royal Bank of Scotland, because of something connected with his father's address.

But what? David Searil of East Kilbride was not aware he had ever had any bad debts. So, intrigued, he sent off two cheques last November, which were ignored. RBS chased Equifax up for him, but still nothing. He wrote again in April and July. Does nobody at Equifax read any mail?

Only when he wrote a final letter about a month ago, indicating that he was sending a copy to me, did he get a reply.

I didn't realise I was that scary. But it wasn't particularly good news. He was invited to apply again, sending two more cheques for (pounds) 4. As David points out: "It may not sound much money, but if you are receiving thousands of applications a week, it becomes big business."

I agree, so I tried to get through to the Crap Response Agency myself, only to find it is impossible. I got numbers off everyone, from the British Bankers' Association, to big institutions and its competitor agency Experian.

But I couldn't get through to a human voice on any of them. You just get pushed from recorded message to recorded message. And this from a Glasgow company.

And I know from my e-mails that David's situation isn't an isolated incident. But what can we do? No matter how much I insult them in the newspaper, nobody gets back to me either, which is unprecedented, (my phone is usually red-hot come Monday morning).

So I have decided that it is going to have to be a long campaign. Equifax is going to be the butt of my cheap jibes every single week from now, until I get a response from them. Any contributions from you will be gratefully received and replied to.

Teresa Hunter is Freelance Personal Finance Writer of the Year