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September 14, 2017 at 08:28 AM
Senate lawmakers are wasting little time in reacting to the Equifax breach.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., reintroduced Thursday her Equal Employment for All Act to prohibit employers from requiring potential employees to disclose their credit history when applying for a job, while Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, introduced a Free Credit Freeze Act, which would guarantee all consumers can use PINs to freeze and unfreeze their credit free of charge to stop fraudsters from opening new unauthorized financial accounts.
Warren noted the urgency has increased for such legislation in light of the Equifax breach, which “compromised millions of Americans’ security and jeopardized their credit.”
She originally introduced the bill in August 2015, noting at the time that “a bad credit rating is far more often the result of unexpected medical costs, unemployment, economic downturns, or other bad breaks than it is a reflection on an individual’s character or abilities.”
In her Thursday remarks in reintroducing the bill, Warren stated that the bill “is about basic fairness — let people compete on the merits, not on whether they already have enough money to pay all their bills. It makes no sense to make it harder for people to get jobs because of a system of credit reporting that has no correlation with job performance.”
Credit histories, she added, “are riddled with errors and the recent Equifax breach makes that much more likely.”
Wyden said in introducing his bill that “companies like Equifax that have stockpiled massive, insecure databases of Americans’ most sensitive personal data must make security the top priority at every single stage. Given the frequency of these mega breaches, it is simply unacceptable for the credit agencies to continue to charge hardworking Americans who want to protect their credit and their identity from fraudsters.”
