CFPB FinEx Webinar June 25, 2015 1:00 pm CT Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. During the question-and-answer session you may press star 1 on your touchtone phone if you would like to ask question. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time. I’d now like to turn the meeting over to the meeting coordinator. You may begin. Great. Well, thank you everyone for joining our Webinar today. I’m the person who’s been managing the (CFPB) financial education exchange that most of you are part of. And I’m delighted to be bringing this Webinar today to you. We will have three speakers - myself, the Office of Financial Empowerment and the Consumer Response Office. We’ll tell you more about their roles in a minute. So quickly, let me just find my correct clicker here. Okay, quickly just a disclaimer here. This is a Bureau Webinar but does not constitute legal interpretation or guidance. We just need to let you guys know that. So the CFPB, most of you know, we are the newest federal agency around. We’re here to help consumer finance markets work better. We work on both educating consumers, enforcing and supervising around financial product providers, like financial institutions and others, and also studying by gathering and analyzing data around markets and consumers. And just so you know, we primarily represent the consumer facing side here as opposed to the industry or regulatory side of the Bureau within the Consumer Education and Engagement Division. I’m with the Office of Financial Education but we also have several other offices dealing with special populations including financial empowerment which is low income and economically vulnerable consumers. One of our speakers is from there. We also have a large division that takes consumer complaints. We’ll be hearing from a representative from there a little bit later. So that’s who we are. And we will - we can get our clicker to work here. Give me one second. And just a quick word about OFE, we’re - the Office of Financial Education, we’re trying to support and strengthen channels for delivering financial education. That really means trying to support all of you as financial educators to help consumers make good financial decisions. We also do some direct to consumer work and also do a fair amount of research to better understand consumers and effects of financial education. And it’s some of that type of research that we’ll be reporting on both in this Webinar and other Webinars to come. I have to do a quick word about Financial Education Exchange, or (FINEX). I think all of you are on this list but we continue to grow this. We’re only a few weeks old really. We already have about 600 people signed up which is great, and we will be adding new features going forward. One thing I just want to note, many of you got an email about this just over the last few days. We have the next few Webinars planned out, so I just put them up on the screen there. It’s that Consumer Complaint Database where you can learn more how to use that feature to help your clients and also a Webinar on our - Your Money, Your Goals toolkit in September. So just the know that those are coming. And I also just wanted to quickly draw your attention to the resource inventory which you can see on our Web page that has all the tools and resources that we have for financial educators now. And also I want to plug LinkedIn, a great way for you to learn about what we’re doing and also post your own resources and thoughts, and so I encourage everybody to sign up for all that. So on to today’s topic. We’re going to be talking about consumer credit reports and scores today. And their agenda is as follows - we’re going to hear about two new reports - research reports the Bureau has done looking at consumer attitudes on credit reports and also some new research on the number of people who don’t have a credit file or credit score. And then we’ll run through a number of tools and resources that you can use with your clients around credit reporting. So first up is the consumer voices on credit reports and scores. This report came out in February. In our intention here was to better - to really understand what consumers know and think about credit scores, to help us better design financial education initiatives. And so we wanted to hear consumers from - in their own voices talk about what they thought, understood, there attitudes, their perceptions and so to do that we did focus groups just about a year ago with a total of 308 consumers in four areas around the country - Atlanta, Boston, St. Louis and Seattle, and really delved into what consumers thought about credit scores, what they knew, how much they understood, about a whole range of topics related to that. So this gives us qualitative insights into a broad range of consumer thoughts. We just want to be clear, it’s not a representative sample. It was a very diverse sample. It had a wide range of types of consumers and backgrounds, but we don’t represent this as being, you know, this is what everybody thinks. And since we screened for experience with financial products, it’s not always positive experiences but we screened for some degree of experience, the participants tended to be a little more knowledgeable probably and active with their credit then perhaps the general population. So just keep that in mind. So the kind of high level summary is this - we found really quite a bit of knowledge about credit scores and credit reporting. I think more than I had perhaps expected based on other research from the past. I think there’s a lot more awareness now than maybe five or ten years ago just due to all the things happening in financial markets. But we found areas of some knowledge, in particular, a lot of interesting concern about credit scores, knowledge that credit history affects access to obviously to credit, to cost of credit and two other issues like, in some cases, employment, job access, apartment rental, things like that. People seem to have a general sense that there are multiple bureaus and multiple scores as opposed to just a single source of a credit score report. People understood in general, that their own behavior had a, you know, had a strong impact on their score and that some events or issues will fall off credit reports over time. But at the same time, we also saw a fair amount of consumer confusion on some of the details. People find it difficult to disentangle credit reports and credit scores. And I’m sure a lot of you have seen some of these things in your own work with clients. People were puzzled by the differences in the information across the credit reports from different reporting agencies. They were uncertain on how to access a free credit reports and what are sort of the implications of doing that would be. They were uncertain if accessing your free report would impact their scores. And interestingly, they felt that scores were not always within their own control even though they had acknowledged their behavior was a part of it. It still felt sort of mysterious to them in some cases. So just to go into a few specifics - as I work on my scrolling here, generally, we found people’s access to credit reports and scores in several ways. So obviously here, they could get them online through Annual Credit Report.com or through other sources. In many cases, people were not necessarily sure which sites would give them a free credit report or not. Some people saw their credit score on a credit card statement because a number of financial institutions are now offering or are now putting credit scores or offering access to credit scores on their statements. In some cases, people were not certain what to do once they saw that score which is kind of an opportunity for financial education, I think. And then there were a another set of ways people would sometimes see their scores are reports through credit monitoring services, as a result of a data breach, if they apply for a loan and it may be shown their score report by their lender or after being denied credit. So there was a range of ways that people saw the report or score. We found that people had some difficulty in obtaining and an understanding a credit report. So some consumers were uncomfortable with or had difficulty navigating the free site, the government sort of required side of Annual Credit Report.com, which is where you can get your free report from each of the three major bureaus every 12 months. People were sometimes a little uncomfortable with the security questions you have the answer to get access, and in some cases, did not successfully get to their credit report. And again, as I said earlier, people were unsure if requesting copies of their free credit reports could negatively affect their scores. If you do it through Annual Credit Report.com, once every 12 months, it will not affect your score but people were sometimes afraid of that, and that sometimes - some folks said they were not taking their score - a report regularly because they weren’t certain it was going to have an impact on their score. People also - some people had trouble understanding the credit reports. They felt somewhat overwhelmed looking at the report. And again, not everybody, but some set of consumers. And some people were confused because they didn’t recognize the names of the financial institutions or lenders are creditors that they saw on the credit report. In some cases, their loans or lines of credit had been sold to another institution. In some cases they were - just didn’t - it was in the name that appeared on their statement and so that caused some confusion. Okay, now slide. We asked a little bit about what people - what they did with their credit reports and scores when they did find out. And I think one observation we had on what people said that I think was kind of interesting is that people seemed to - many consumers seemed to have a very sort of binary sense of credit scores, that people - there are people with high credit scores and then there is everybody else. And people with high credit scores can good credit and everyone else just has to take whatever, you know, whatever they can get. And they - and people that necessarily recognize, in some cases, the fact that incremental improvements in the credit could lead to incrementally better rates in some cases. So it again presents a financial education opportunity I think. Many consumers said that they were not sure how to improve their scores. And consumers did not report very often trying to use their credit reports and scores to negotiate around credit access our costs. It’s harder to do that in a time of automated underwriting but there were still opportunities for people - said that it wasn’t really working for them to try to reference their credit score or they weren’t doing it very often. So what we did with all this information was to segment consumers by their behaviors and their motivation so we could kind of better understand the different sort of segments of experience that consumers have had. So we segments of them initially by how and whether they checked their credit report, so some folks checked regularly, some checked only in the past, some had never checked. And then we look at the different motives there. And that idea behind doing this is if we understand why people are, you know, either free to check their credit or aren’t checking their credit, we can better target messages in consumer education are other things we might do with consumers to adjust their particular issues or fear. So, for example, in the active checkers, which are people who check at least annually, some of those folks were motivated by fraud or error. There had been something - that had been a victim of fraud or error and wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. Some people were we call gauging their progress, people who, in some cases, were working on credit repair or just wanted the information of seeing a good credit report and they checked fairly frequently. The other three categories in some ways are more, you know, a target, I think, of opportunity for all of us which is that these are people who are not checking or don’t know what to do if they check. So former checkers are people who had checked credit at some point in the past but hadn’t recently. Some of them felt they didn’t need to know. I should say know, not now, but it’s actually somewhat accurate to safety didn’t know to know now either. And - because they weren’t about to make a major purchase and I think they may not realize that there’re reasons to check just to make sure there’s not fraud or error or to think about credit improvement. Some folks weren’t expecting a change in their credit report and didn’t feel like they needed to check regularly. And some people had tried and didn’t like it so they had a negative experience. Maybe they didn’t like the security questions or they were confused or something about it made them uncomfortable. And again, you would want to target different messages to help people manage their credit if they’re facing these particular issues. Non-checkers, people who had never checked essentially, either didn’t see the need because again, they didn’t feel like they had any particular financial action coming up, but again they may not know if there were errors or identity theft. They were afraid to check for the filter credit was so bad that they just didn’t want to know, avoiding the pain. And again, for all of those, if you’re trying to encourage people to do be more engaged in the credit, you would want to think about messages that would resonate with the particular emotions they were expressing. And then the last category, the passive checkers, I think it’s a very interesting one. These are folks who have seen their score but not by actively looking for it, typically people who see it on their credit card statement or see it through their financial institution. In the last couple of years there has been a tremendous growth in the number of people who are seeing their score this way. And I think it’s a real opportunity to say to someone who’s never seen it before, suddenly they see their score and it’s a chance for, I think, financial educators to say, “Hey, let’s explore more with that score means. Let’s look at your report. Let’s make sure that this fits into your kind of financial ambitions and aspirations.” So those with the segments we will be working on developing, some financial education materials related to those. And then just implications, again, as I’ve been saying, you can design financial education to meet consumers where they are with different messages that will resonate differently. Obviously there are issues with credit reports being, in some cases, difficult to read and difficult to access. And so I think if there’s interest in making sure that that’s as easy as possible for consumers. And then obviously here’s the place where a lot of you will also be able to help out, is helping people to take action, the open credit score initiative which is this effort to get credit scores on people’s statements and bills from their financial institutions - really does present an opportunity to engage consumers. So that’s that research, and I’m interested, over time, talking to a lot of you folks to see what ways in which this segmentation might be helpful and how you’re actually engaging consumers who are working on their credit. So I’m going to stop there and turn it over to (Sara Baten-Con) from Financial Empowerment. We’re going to keep going. If you have questions, you can type them into the Q&A box in the Live Meeting. At the end, we’ll open up to spoken questions as well. So I will turn it over to the Office of Financial Empowerment. Great. Hi everyone. I’m with CCB’s Office of Financial Empowerment which I mentioned, focuses on goal income and other economically vulnerable consumers. At some going to cover a few different slides, and if you have questions, I think we’re saving them to the end. So this is about our data point Credit Invisibles. In May, we released the new data points. It was really an effort of our - CCB’s Office of Research. But it’s called the Credit Invisibles. Before I jump into findings, it may be helpful to talk about terminology for a second. So consumers with limited credit histories can be placed into two groups. You may be familiar with terms referring to (just under) no credit file consumers. Our report focuses on what we call Credit Invisible and Credit Unscoreable. And so the first group is comprised of consumers without credit bureau credit records. So we refer to those as Credit Invisibles. The second group includes consumers who may have credit records but their records are considered unscorable, which means they contain insufficient credit histories to contain a credit - to generate a credit score. And then we further, in this data point, which is available on our Web site, and you may have actually been sent it if you are on any of our Listservs, but so we further unpacked those two unscorable groups into two. So one that where there’s insufficient information to generate a score. You know, maybe there are too few accounts are too few trade lines to really reliably calculate their credit score. And the other segment is what we call stale. And that contains no recently reported activity. Typically that’s about six months but that may vary by credit scoring companies. Just quickly, we’ll know - I’m not going to jump into methodology too much but I wanted to note that the data we use came from three sources. One is the CFPB has a consumer credit panel data which is a sample of de-identified credit records. And then the study also includes Census data and In American Community Survey data. Next slide. Okay, so in terms of the findings, key findings include - and this data is as of 2010 - 26 million consumers in the US were considered credit invisible. This represents about 11% of the adult population. An additional 9 million consumers or 8.3% of the adult population had credit records that were treated as unscorable. And, again, I already mentioned the two groups, but the breakdown is in terms of insufficient credit history, that’s 9.9 million consumers, and the lack of recent history, that stale (file) that I had mentioned, 9.6 million consumers. So there are just two key takeaways I think that won’t be a surprise to most of you but I’ll just note. There’s a strong relationship between income and having a scored credit record. Almost 30% of consumers in low income neighborhoods are considered credit invisible. An additional 15% have unscored records. And you can see the difference on the slide between those neighborhoods and upper income neighborhoods. And then the second key take away is that African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be credit invisible or have unscored credit records. So about 15% of African-Americans and Hispanic consumers are credit invisible and an additional 13% are considered or have on scored records. So one question we often get is, you know, sort of so (what are) we going to do about this? You know, we’re continuing to look into the data and think about strategies. I think it’s helpful to note that the Bureau has many different roles in terms of thinking about access and solutions. My office, the Office of Financial Empowerment, advocates for access to credit by vulnerable populations. Irene, you know, talked about the work that they’re doing, so is a look into consumer information and tools, they’re looking at specific segments which could include the credit invisible segment. But we also have divisions that focus on research, so really understanding consumer issues upfront, which is what this report does, but then also assessing the merits inappropriateness of all solutions. So that might be, you know, how are consumers affected by certain types of data? How are lenders affected? But we also have offices that are concerned with the appropriateness of certain types of data and the accuracy of data. So it becomes a very complicated conversation, but we’ll continue to look into this, so please stay tuned. Next slide. Okay, next slide. Okay, I’m going to talk about two sorts of solutions or tools that we’ve been working on over the past actually couple of years. But the Office of Financial Empowerment has worked - been working with stakeholders to help streamline the credit reporting, the credit (polling) procedures, rather, for child welfare agencies. So we’ve worked with our partners, or federal partners, which has included FTC, HHS and more recently, the Treasury Department, as well as nonprofit organizations that are experts in sort of child welfare issues as well as credit issues including child focus and credit (unintelligible) to streamline the credit report polling procedures for child welfare agencies. And then also think about how to help them develop capacity to help youth in foster care who’ve suffered from identity theft issues or fraud or errors on their credit reports, and then also help build those him people’s understanding of credit and the importance of credit so that when they, you know, emancipate or when they become - when the exit the system, that they have the ability to, in turn, know how to pull their own reports and then recognize errors and address those errors. So last May, released tools to protect foster care children from credit reporting problems. So these tools included some tips sheets and some action letters, and I’m just going to quickly flag those for you, and they’re available on our Web site and we can also follow up. Did you - have they been sent out to the group? They’re in the - no, not as such, so we can - you can follow up with that. So we can follow up and send you this, but there are three different letters - well, there are two tips sheets. One is for parents in general, worried about their children, and then the other is specifically focused on foster care caseworkers. And they both kind of focus on helping young people start and maintain good credit. So for caseworkers, the tip sheet provides instructions on how to check the credit records of youth in foster care and how to respond if there’s an error on a credit report or any evidence of identity theft. So typically, this is all streamlined through - the caseworker has to work through the child welfare agency that has a contract with one of the bureaus. So it’s an entirely separate process. If you are a caseworker working in a foster care system, you’re probably aware of that at this point. But just note that it’s a completely separate kind of process than if you were just a parent working with your child on this kind of issue. So you can use any of these - or any of these tools adaptable for a parent, anyone, you know, on the phone who has a client who might actually want to look into their kid’s credit report situation? Sure. Yes, absolutely, especially - yes, I think so. The letters that - the tip sheets are pretty focus for both, you know, parents on one hand and then for caseworkers on the other hand. The letters that we (processed), which I’ll mention in a second, are really focused on caseworkers because we had kind of a specific goal of helping, again, build the capacity and the ability of caseworkers to respond to these issues. But we have lots of tools for parents, and if anyone is confused or need some, you know, guidance on that, please don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know. So, let’s see, the letters - let me just quickly flag the letters. There are three for three different scenarios. We thought it might be easier to create the different scenarios and have tailored letters versus having one letter that the case workers would have to tailor themselves. But the first is for minors where credit report should not exist for the minors. So minors generally cannot legally enter into contracts for credit. So that means that credit - the credit bureaus do not knowingly create reports on them. So the caseworker can use this letter, and it basically tells the credit bureaus that this credit report has been reviewed in the youth is disputing all items because the count shouldn’t be there in the first place. The second letter is for - it’s similar in nature but sometimes what happens is the issue isn’t identified until the youth is 18 or over, and so some child welfare systems go to 21 and a caseworker might be working with an old- what we call it older youth in foster care. But the actual activity happened when they were minors, so it’s a similar kind of intent saying that there should never have been a contract established with this person. You know, with all due respect, please take it off. And then the third is for issues that, for use in foster care but at happened when they actually were adults. And so that process is more similar to what many of us would experience if we find an error on our credit reports and we just want to dispute the error because it’s not correct. And so in general - moving forward, the (unintelligible) is going to continue to coordinate closely with our federal partners as well as others involved in addressing credit issues facing children in the US who ages out of foster care. I should note that we also accept complaints about credit reporting issues, and you’ll be hearing from my colleague in Consumer Response, in a few minutes. Okay, next. we touched on this a little bit - the credit score access for counselors. Some of you may have heard about (CPB)’s open credit score initiative. I know I just mentioned it. So this - the goal of this is to help increase consumer’s access to credit scores and credit reports so that consumers can be empowered. And last year we launched this initiative and called on more of the nation’s top credit card companies to make credit scores freely available to their customers. Today, more than a dozen credit card companies, as well as other lenders, provide credit scores directly and freely to consumers. So a more recent development in this body of work, and this is something that we announced - we announced it originally in April and then we just had an update in June. So another - the recent development relates to sharing of credit scores and credit reports to nonprofit counselors, so this can include housing counselors, credit counselors, other types of financial counseling, counselors working in nonprofit organizations. But it relates to the credit scores and reports that you purchase on behalf of your client. So typically, the contracts between the bureaus in the nonprofit organizations were prohibited from allowing the counselors to share that reports and reports with their clients. And so, you know, we know that this is a barrier to working with clients because the credit reports and scores help counselors engaging and good conversations with clients about steps that clients can take to improve financial situations. So we recognize in this area, we worked with industry to try to make progress on these issues and so we brought these concerns about restrictions to the attention of both FICO and the credit bureaus. So we were very excited in April when FICO announced that they had changed their policy and a have worked with the bureaus to change their contracts and their agreements. And so this opened the door for clients - for counselors now to share reports and scores with their clients. So - and also with this, so that was just kind of the score issue. But this also paved the way for sharing of reports which is also prohibited. There are a couple scenarios, there are a couple of exceptions where a credit bureau might allow an organization share a certain type of score or report, so for example, (Advantage) score. But in general, the vast majority of organizations were not able to share the scores and reports. So we’re very excited about this and is our hope that ending these restrictions will help empower consumers. And so I should note that there is a process, if organizations are interested in signing up for this ability to share their score, they have to go to FICO’s Web site and there some qualifying information, certain organizations qualify, and you have to kind of opt into it. If anyone has trouble finding that information or has questions about it, let us know. Great, so that’s a resource that many of the folks on the line for actually working directly with clients may want to be able to do. So if you’re doing credit counseling or pulling credit reports for your clients, you have more flexibility now. You might want to actually sign up for that. Now we’re going to turn Consumer Response. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m a first-time guest here, but a longtime fan of the work that you do in the financial education generally. I’m here today to talk about a document that we put together and manage. We’ve done it for a few years now which hopefully will be of interest and use for your listeners and their clients. And I can also talk about our office, the Office of Consumer Response. As I said, that’s where I work and a cover consumer reporting and also credit repair, so these are two complaint programs that we manage in which consumers can come to our Web site or give us a call or send us a letter with whatever problems they’re having in these respective product spaces and we send those complaints to the companies. I can tell you more about that later, but right now, we want to talk about the list of consumer reporting agencies. What this document is, is it provides a list of the companies, as it says. It’s not intended to cover the entire marketplace. It’s intended to give readers a sense of the consumer reporting ecosystem. It has the nationwide CRAs right up top in the beginning, the experience... Can you define CRA, for those of us who are not... Oh, right, right. Consumer - right there, on the top of Page 25, Consumer Reporting Agencies, and there are also specialties, and I can tell you about those. So it gives the reader a flavor for all of the different reporting agencies that there are out there. And Consumer Reporting Agencies are basically the experience of the world plus a whole bunch of other ones that people are familiar with. Right, right. So to the extent consumers know about these organizations. They’ve heard of Experience, Equifax, Trans Union, but what they may not know is that there are companies, niche specialty CRAs that just focus on certain parts of the marketplace. So you’ll have CRAs that will just sell personal data, consumer data to banks, for example, for the purpose of helping banks manage account and fraud risk related to account openings and check writing. So that the type of a specialty CRA. Another type of a specialty CRA would be those institutions that sell personal data to landlords for the purpose of tenant screening. Another would be for employment, for employment screening, and on and on. And the list now consists of nearly 50 companies. And what it does is it gives all of the contact information for the companies. And the reason why we do that is that the primary law that governs this space is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and as - the word fair is in there, and as a matter of fairness, consumers have a right to see who’s reporting what about them. But in order to do that, you need to know who it is that’s doing the reporting. And so that’s what this list does, is that tells you a lot of the names out there of the biggest or bigger institutions that are doing this reporting. And it really makes it easy for those who have an interest and inclination to contact the companies and request this information. And a lot of these companies provide the reports that they build to consumers, once every 12 months for free, if the consumer requests it. So all they have to - all the consumer needs to do is requested and they will get it, and in many instances, for free. So we provide that information. We try to keep it up-to-date. And then the other thing is, once the consumer gets a hold of the report, if they happen to spot any errors, the Fair Credit Reporting Act gives them the right to dispute that with the companies, and in the companies, under the same law, have an obligation to conduct, in quotes, “a reasonable investigation,” at no cost to the consumer. And so this document really lays all that out with that information and gives that to consumers in one easy place. So hopefully the folks on the phone well see some value in that. So that’s Page 24, my 24. And then hear a rain has some sites just about our office, the Office of Consumer Response, and as mentioned, we handle complaints. It creates all kinds of great data for us so we’re able to take that and see consumer pain points in the marketplace and create content such as the aforementioned report. And then lots of FAQs that we write as part of our Ask CFPB Program that we read a lot of content working with my friends here at the table. And, of course, we help consumers directly by complaints that we route two companies and the companies provide responses and they can be very helpful to consumers on better educating them in providing solutions to their problems. So that’s that page. And (in terms) of how we help, I already talked about that. The companies are responding to the complaints that we route to them. The companies have enrolled in our - into this program, and actually that’s a big part of how we can do something like the list of the CRAs because we, by virtue of enrolling, the companies provide - they identify who they are. They also provide all of their contact information, and so it’s very easy to share that information, and so that’s a great example of sharing data. And as - and then, we see here on the right, market-wide information, and so we provide that. And we also develop, based on our complaint data, we provide a lot of targeted reports for our colleagues within the Bureau in our enforcement and supervision areas. And then here on the next page, complaints we accept now. Well, basically, if it’s a financial service or product, we take it. So that list is pretty comprehensive. There’s even a catchall there - other financial services, and that’s where you’ll find credit repair. We take complaints on those. And as of 1st of June, we’re up to nearly 650,000 complaints handled. And for the program that I manage, credit reporting, I checked our public database today. We’re up to over 60,000 complaints. And that’s sense the fourth quarter of 2012. And then finally, reaching us, very easy, can be easier. You just go to our Web site, Consumerfinance.gov, and that’s where your clients, if they have an issue with the financial service provider, they can submit a complaint to us and we’ll send it off to the company and work to get a response for your clients. Great. And just to reiterate this is actually a great resource for all of you in working with clients to help people or to encourage people to submit complaints. They - the Bureau will actually reach out to companies. Companies will have to get back and - with response to the complaint, so it is a great tool. Just one note though, Jonah, and we will talk about this on the Webinar in a month, specifically about how to use the system. But we have to be careful, as I understand it, of a financial educator filing on behalf of someone, right? Ah, well, yes. And - yes, I can speak to the program that I manage for consumer reporting, credit reporting, credit repair. The program is eligible for third parties, so you can submit on behalf of somebody else. You just need to be transparent about it. So we’ll ask questions of who you are, and as long as you complete those boxes, you’re good to go. Okay, that’s helpful because I’ve heard there - in some cases, there can be issues of a financial institution or... ((Crosstalk)) Yes, there are sensitivities, as you can imagine, at the corporate level for the companies about not disclosing a customer’s PII to an author... To find PII. Personal... Personal Identifying - sorry, that’s an inside government term for folks, seeing someone’s private information. Yes, so there are sensitivities there which are understandable. So it’s - where - the space that I work in, which is consumer reporting, their - the Fair Credit Reporting Act puts some pretty serious burdens on the CRAs to keep - to respect confidentiality and privacy. And so the companies that I work with, if there - if that isn’t there, if that isn’t in place, if they don’t have confidence that who it is, is completing the document where the complaint form, in this case, is who they say they are, they will get very nervous, very fast, and they won’t respond in a meaningful way. Great. So again, that’s something everyone should think about. If you have clients are people you’re working with, either around credit reporting or any other financial product, the Bureau’s submit a complaint function can be very useful. Just make sure you’re clear and fill out the sections, if you doing it for someone, on third-party. All right, so just two more quick things we want to show you, just two slides. The first is we have, on our Web site on Consumerfinance.gov, there is a section of the Web site called Ask CFPB, and it is a question and answer sort of database with a lot of common questions that we’ve heard from consumers around all sorts of financial products, including credit reports and scores. And so they are very straightforward, plain language, easy to use and read, so we encourage you to use them yourself as needed, use them with customers or clients of yours, and it’ll be a useful resource. And then the last thing I’ll say as we do also have a number of brochures and fact sheets and things that are, not only available for free, but you can order them in bulk to use with your clients. In the resource inventory I mentioned at the very beginning of the Webinar, which you can get at our Web site, list out all of our brochures. But I’ll just call attention to two of them here. These are two-page fact sheets, one on checking your credit report, how to do it, and another one on how to monitor your credit report. These are just screenshots of the front of those fact sheets, but if you get to the ordering side, which can get to through our Web site, you can order these in bulk. And so these, plus a few others - in fact, there’s a new one that specifically, on specialty credit reporting, the list that we mentioned earlier, which will tell you how to - why and how to check with a specialty credit reporting agencies. So those are all available. So I’m going to stop here and open it up for questions. We have about 12 minutes left. I’m first going to read - well, actually first, operator, we’re ready for - to open for questions. So operator, will tell you in a minute how to submit or how to sort of raise your hand to say you want to ask a verbal question. Once she’s done that, I will read one of the - a couple of the questions that have come in via the question and answer function on the Webinar itself. So operator, would you like to guide us? Yes, sure. At this time, if you’d like to ask a question from the phone, you may press star 1. Please remember to unmute your phone and record your first and last name clearly when prompted. In the event that you would like to withdraw your question, press 2. One moment, please, for our first question. Okay, so - and while we’re waiting for those, I will read one question that came in related to the issue of young people and credit reports . How should or how can a minor check to see if there’s a credit report fraudulently established in his or her name? Okay. So the first question I’d ask is, are we talking about a minor in a foster care system or a minor in general? So - and I’ll just answer the question kind of based on either. So for a young person in foster care, each child - and I kind of touched on this but each child welfare agency has set up contracts with - it’s supposed to - there’s a new law, a new-ish law passed a few years ago requiring child welfare agencies to pull credit reports for youth in foster care. And it’s been - it’s taken a few years for child welfare agencies to comply with this because - partly because, as you can imagine, child welfare agencies and credit bureaus have very different languages and don’t necessarily understand each other’s processes, but there’s a lot of process involved on each side. So it’s taken a little while, but an agency will have typically a contract with either one or - one, two or three of the bureaus. And so if you are a caseworker or kind of helping navigate this new law, and compliance in this new law, and you’re working with young people, I would first find out if - how - and, of course, to complicate things, each child welfare agency has set up a slightly different process. So in some cases, each caseworker will go through this process, and in some cases, there’s, like, a designated person in a more centralized place in the agency that does this. But regardless, there’s, like, a portal that each bureau has set up. And then the caseworker would provide the information about that - each child (to) the portal and if there is a file, they’ll send back the file. And then at that point, the goal would be to work with the young person on looking to the report, identifying the errors and then working with the child welfare - working with the credit bureau, rather, to fix the errors. And this is all outlined in the tip sheets that I mentioned on our Web site. So if it’s a young person in general, like a parent is interested in a child, each bureau had a separate process. In general, you know, in general it is good especially the think that - if you suspect something has happened, but Trans Union, for example, has an online portal where parents can go in and they can fill out what they call a child identity theft inquiry form. And so you fill in certain information and they’ll let you know if there’s a report in your child’s name. And then they also have different steps in different options if there is - if you suspect identity theft. For Equifax, you have to - your parents and guardians have to send documents by mail, by snail mail, so a letter explaining, you know, that the child may be a victim of identity theft, provide a copy of the minor’s Social Security card, a copy of the minor’s birth certificate and a copy of the parent or guardian’s driver’s license to an address. And then for Experian, similar. There are number of documents - the child’s birth certificate, Social Security, et cetera, that you have to - the parent or guardian would have to send by snail mail to the sites. And then again, they walk you through the process to fix the errors. Yes, which is why we developed tip sheets. Great. Actually before I ask the operator if we have any verbal questions, I just want to know - I know some people had some trouble getting into the Webinar software. My apologies. Some people’s computers just don’t like it. I know some of you are listening, but we are - listening without the Webinar part. We do record this and post - we’ll post the Webinar so you’ll be able to see it and here it. It usually takes about week or so, so we’ll send out a notification so folks to know when that’s all. So my apologies. Not every system works with every computer, and we’ve run into this before. Operator, are there questions (on the phone)? At this time -- excuse me -- at this time there are no questions on the phone queue. Once again, if you’d like to ask a question from the phone, press star 1 and record your name. Let’s give it another minute or two and see if anyone has questions. All of the things we talked about today are on our Web site along with more. And we will have more Webinars coming up where we’ll spend some time talking about bureau tools and other topics that we think will be helpful to financial educators. We have one question coming in. One moment please. Our first question Hello. Can you all hear me?Yes we can. Okay, great. Listen, first of all, as a credit counselor for over 17 years, I want to say thank you so much. You guys have made my life much easier the last couple of years with all the wonderful information. But what really helped me a lot, and I just want to ask about Trans Union, because maybe I missed it - we were talking about the non-foster care minor check for their credit reports, most of the clientele that I deal with, unfortunately, the parents or relative have stolen the identity. Can you help me with how we address that because it’s very sensitive? Yes, so it’s something that we hear about. In the case where the young person is a minor or when the issue happened when they were a minor, they - you can draft a letter that basically states that the issue happened when they were a minor and, therefore, they were not able to enter into contracts legally, and therefore, there should not be any activity on the report. If this works for - you know, you can complain to either the Bureau or to the original creditor, the original company that, you know, that offered - sometimes is not a creditor. It’s like a utility company. And typically that works. And the FTC has developed a form that you can use called the Uniform Minor Disclosure Form. I think I’m getting that right. And we have a link to our Web site, too, that’s helpful, so you - child identity theft - no, I’ll find it. But if you include the letter along with that form from the FTC, usually that’s sufficient. And that helps - because I’m guessing what you’re getting at is it becomes very difficult. The child often doesn’t want to get a police report, right, because it’s a... ((Crosstalk)) Yes, so if it’s, again, a minor or the activity happened when they were a minor, this is a way to bypass that process. Okay, because I did it the old-fashioned way before where, you know, we just had to do the letters, prove the person wasn’t of age, all of that. So this is actually news to me that we have these uniform letters that I can use because, as you say, you know, even when the child becomes an adult, they don’t want to press charges and to the police report angle the other route. So it was kind of tricky the last few times I’ve done it. We got through the situation but this is going to help me tremendously as I come across the situation. Yes, so you’ll just have to - again, our letters and on our Web site currently - we have general letters for disputing but the letters I mentioned were specifically meant for caseworkers. But they could easily be tailored to someone who’s not a caseworker was just, like, a guardian or a parent. And the form is the Uniform Minor Status Declaration form. Of course, being in the government, we have to make a very complicated. But it’s linked on our tip sheet through our Web site, or you can just go to the FTC’s Web site to find it. And that just makes it a little bit more formal and it makes it easier for you, too, to fill it out. Okay, so let me just be clear. If the parent is no longer in that adult child’s life and they’re - we’re doing this and I’m helping them as a counselor and get through this process, I will be able to assist them with that letter. ((Crosstalk)) I’m not going to write it for them. I do it with them and I don’t represent them. I’m not a lawyer, but I just want to make sure that form will still help me with that process. Well, so that form is actually for - if the person is a minor. If they are not a minor, it’s - you were right in (alluding) to the fact that the adult should actually fill out the letter. You can help them obviously. But then be very clear. In our - the one letter we have that is for people, you know, people over 18 but when the error occurred, when they were minors, you can use that one is the guide to understand how we - you know, have the language. Correct. And also, you know, what some agencies have done, which is kind of interesting, is if you see a trend, like, it tends to be the utility company or something, then they’ve developed relationships with that utility company so there’s a more streamlined process. So you can send it, you know, all the information right away and they’re ready to deal with it. Okay. Yes. And, you know, often - we get the stories here, it’s like, the parents want to keep the lights on so it’s hard to - you know, you can understand it, so. Yes, it’s not always identity theft in the traditional way, you mean, of a stranger taking your identity. Sometimes it’s more complicated. Exactly. I just - you guys touched on it but the question back to the caller is, with your clients, are you - you’re mostly advising them and they do this on their own or do - are there... ((Crosstalk)) Well, in the two cases, I can be specific. One was about eight years ago and that was the first one I came across like that. It was a young man trying to get a house and he wanted to make sure he was ready. And when we pulled his credit, they had - it was relatives. They - his parents had died and they took care of him, so the cousins, the aunts, everyone had stolen his identity. They did credit cards, cars, apartments, utilities. And it actually took us about two years to clear everything up for this young man. And we just did it the old-fashioned way, sending letters and proving that he was a minor at the time that it happened. And it was cumbersome but we got it done and he was able to get a house. But it took us two years to work through the process so was very painful. Right, and I - the reason why I asked if it’s related to something I said earlier about privacy which is something that the companies take very seriously. And they each - they may have different requirements. And so if you are acting as an intermediary on behalf of a natural person, right, on behalf of your clients, the companies will need to see some sort of evidence that you have authorization to do that. And so what that means is specific to each company, they’re going to have their own requirements and so it might be something like an executed power of attorney that you have to show them, right, a document like that. So, too, through our complaint program, when a third-party submits, we don’t get specific about documents like that because individual - it depends on each individual company and so we have no way of providing guidance there except to say, with reducing, through (helper text), that different companies have different requirements. And so it’s important that, if you’re going to do that, that you just have that awareness and perhaps everybody on the phone already does since they work with clients every day but I just thought I’d mention that. Thank you very much. It looks like we’re actually out of time. So thank you very much for everyone who is on the call today, and my apologies to those of you who are only listening and not seeing. But we will - you will have an opportunity to view the slides later. So thanks everyone and you’ll get more information from FINEX for upcoming Webinars that we’ll have in other activities coming up. So thank you very much. We will end the call now. Thanks all. This concludes today’s conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. END