Experian To Stop Reporting All Tax Lien Data

According to a March 19 letter sent by Experian to its clients, the company will remove all remaining tax liens from its consumer credit reporting database beginning the week of April 16.

This finalizes the move by credit bureaus (including Equifax and TransUnion) to stop including civil judgments and tax liens on consumer credit reports.

When Experian started to omit this information last summer, many funding companies were in shock.

“The IRS could come in and seize credit card processing accounts and prevent the lender from getting paid,” David Goldin told AltFinanceDaily last summer in regards to the potential risk of lien data being hidden. (Goldin is the CEO of Capify, a funding company with offices in the UK, Australia and formerly the US.) “Once you have a judgment, a creditor could come in and freeze bank accounts.”  

Yellowstone Capital CEO Isaac Stern also expressed concern last summer. But fears about this have mostly been mollified as funding companies have found other ways to obtain the same information. By last fall, Yellowstone started using the Clear platform, provided by Thomson Reuters, in more thorough ways in order to obtain the same information that was no longer available to them on Experian.

“You have to dig through it,” Stern said of the vast data to be found on Clear.

Experian did not respond to requests for comment.

Todd Stone was a reporter for AltFinanceDaily.