Column: To Find the Equifax Culprit, ...

Congress Must Probe Itself

A state-of-the art ATM screen, brought to you by a public-private "partnership." (Original image of dirty tile via Unsplash.)

The ongoing Congressional investigation of the Equifax data breach reminds me of a running joke my mother and I had about the old detective series, Murder She Wrote. What if the guilty party all along was the last person we expected, and Jessica Fletcher was really a serial killer who framed random strangers? Except that having our financial information written on a bathroom wall isn't a joke. And, as we shall see, Congress grandstanding about fixing it is a bad one.

Let's consider how the current hearings might instead prevent us from finding out what really happened and how to prevent it from happening again. It may have been fun to hear about the new Equifax CEO admitting that he doesn't know whether his company encrypts our personal information. At least he's being held accountable Gus! you say. But this is a hard problem, which he was only very recently brought in to address. More to the point,Congress effectively made itself the CEO of every credit bureau nearly fifty years ago when it passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)...

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I would like to thank reader Steve D. and my wife for their comments on earlier versions of this piece.

-- CAV