A lot of our business these days involves disputing credit bureau errors, so we were very interested to read this rather appalling story:

The three major agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, keep a V.I.P. list of sorts, according to consumer lawyers and legal documents, consisting of celebrities, politicians, judges and other influential people. Those on the list — and they may not even realize they are on it — get special help from workers in the United States in fixing mistakes on their credit reports. Any errors are usually corrected immediately, one lawyer said.

For everyone else, disputes are herded into a largely automated system. Their complaints are often electronically ferried to a subcontractor overseas, where a worker spends, on average, about two minutes figuring out the gist of the matter, boiling it down to a one-to-three-digit computer code that signifies the problem — “account not his/hers,” for example — and sending a dispute form to the creditor to investigate. Many times, consumer advocates say, the investigation translates to a perfunctory check of its records.

We’re old-fashioned enough to believe that anyone who’s been unfairly denied credit or otherwise penalized deserves the VIP treatment from credit reporting agencies.

(Obligatory pitch: Contact us for help straightening out inaccurate or obsolete information on your credit report. We’ve made credit bureaus wish they’d put our clients on the VIP list!)