The credit rating bureaus, whose reports influence everything from credit cards to mortgages to job offers, have a two-tiered system for resolving errors — one for the rich, the well-connected, the well-known and the powerful, and the other for everyone else.
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.
In Business Jet Industry, a Downturn That Was Not Evenly Shared
During the recent economic downturn, sales of business aircraft fell off a cliff. A five-year string of record growth from 2003 through 2008 ended in a precipitous drop of 28 percent in the value of business aircraft delivered from 2008 to 2010.
The pain, however, has not been evenly shared. Within the overall business jet industry, the upper half of the market — measured by value rather than aircraft numbers and consisting of business jets priced at or above $26 million each — saw growth of 1.5 percent.
By contrast, the lower 50 percent — jets costing $4 million to $25 million apiece — took a 57.1 percent dive.
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