Ever get the feeling that the Big 3 credit bureaus just aren't listening or even responding to your problems when you are working to correct a credit problem?

A new report with the sexy title of Automated Injustice: How a Mechanized Dispute System Frustrates Consumers Seeking to Fix Errors in Their Credit Reports by the NCLC documents how the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) handle (or do not handle) credit reporting disputes.

• Translate detailed disputes painstakingly written by desperate consumers into two or three digit codes.
• Fail to send documents submitted by consumers, such as cancelled checks or payoff statements, to creditors and other information providers involved in the dispute.
• Limit the role of their employees who handle disputes, or of the foreign workers employed by their offshore vendors, to little more than selecting these two or three digit codes. Workers do not examine documents, contact consumers by phone or email, or exercise any form of human discretion in resolving a dispute.
• Some creditors and information providers also shirk their federally mandated responsibility to investigate. The investigative activity of these companies consists primarily of ensuring "data conformity" between their records and the bureaus' records.
• Bureaus have little incentive to conduct proper disputes because creditors, not consumers, are the bureaus' paying customers. Because disputes represent only an expense, the bureaus have minimized the resources to the point that one bureau pays its dispute-handling vendor in the Philippines a mere $0.57 per dispute letter.