You may not have heard of background check reporting company Inflection before, but you almost certainly know companies that use its services. And those that use Checkr, which recently bought Inflection. UberAirbnb, Turo, and DraftKings are all customers.
In theory, it’s a useful service. Want to screen potential employees or hirers? Just use Inflection. But as it turns out, Inflection has a long history of providing inaccurate information, making it impossible for innocent people to find work or housing. Which I think is a bad thing.
Vice’s Motherboard dig into Inflection and found “more than a dozen lawsuits against Inflection over the past three years.” A lot of it was from people who said the company stored incorrect information on their reports, which led to the ban from Airbnb. Oh, and Checkr, the company that bought Inflection? Hundreds of lawsuits have also been filed against them.
For example, one man who settled with Inflection claimed his report included information about two other men with the same name. Because of that mistake, anyone looking at his report would mistake him for a person “with a record of four felonies where one person was intent on committing an armed robbery” and was “forced Possession of a Schedule II opium with a felony intent to manufacture”, along with a “class A felony for trafficking in fentanyl”. “
Based MotherboardInvestigate them, he’s not the only one with issues with their background reports.
As mentioned before, while these services affect people’s ability to use Uber or Airbnb, inaccurate reports also mess with people’s ability to find work and find a place to stay. These days, renting an apartment is hard enough without having to worry that someone with a similar name could make your application. If you are arrested but later acquitted, there is no guarantee that the Inflection report will be updated to include your acquittal, ruining your job prospects without your knowledge.
“It is a problem and mistakes can happen at any point in the chain. Most of the time, with companies buying it, they just get what they get and then report it,” says Mark Mailman, a consumer reporting attorney. Motherboard.
The good news is that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is starting to take this issue seriously. Last year, it warned consumer-reporting companies that “name-only matching” was harmful and potentially illegal.
CFPB Director Rohit Chopra also acknowledged that inaccurate reports disproportionately affect racial minorities, writing: “False identity matching is particularly harmful to affected communities of color. disproportionately due to these negligent activities. The risk of surname mismatch is likely to be higher in Hispanic, Black, and Asian individuals because there is less variation in surnames in those populations than in non-whites. Hispanic”.
However, until the CFPB does more, consumer attorney David Chami told Motherboard, “If you don’t file a lawsuit against these companies, the likelihood of future inaccurate reporting increases. up.”
That doesn’t exactly give regulators confidence that the situation will quickly change for the better, but hopefully, paying more attention to the mess the consumer reporting industry will cause. put more pressure on regulators to clean things up.
