Following a question from creditscoring.com regarding a CNBC claim that “only .5 – 1 percent of consumers” have achieved an 850 credit score, CNBC amended a January 4th story on its website. The error and its correction is not documented.
The original statement was, “MyFICO.com says that only .5 – 1 percent of consumers have achieved this golden number.
The corrected statement is, “MyFICO.com reports that only 13% percent[SIC] of consumers have achieved scores over 800.”
However, in July, (after questions from creditscoring.com about an Associated Press report) Fair Isaac, the company who owns myFICO, removed the distribution chart that included the 13 percent statistic, and said that it would replace it. The credit score company, still, has not provided the replacement.
Despite that, in October, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission heard remarks from the National Consumer Law Center regarding a conclusion cobbled together about the credit score national distribution. The NCLC’s notion that one-quarter of consumers have a credit score under 600 was attributed to Fair Isaac, and the notion that those under 600 comprised only 15 percent before “the Great Recession” was attributed to the Associated Press.
A FICO spokesman said that the AP used the 15 percent statistic “as a proxy for a pre-recession distribution curve.”
On April 13, introducing a segment titled “Credit Check: Career Killer?,” a CNBC anchor asked, “Does a credit score– especially a high one– indicate a better applicant?”
The consumer reporting agencies all claim that they do not provide credit scores for employment purposes.
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