This is the story of a girl named Corey O’Malley, and a boy named Corey O’Malley, who had their credit reports accidentally merged.

Thanks to a hospital clerk’s error, Ms. O’Malley had her credit score down by 300 points thanks to her counterpart’s unpaid medical bills.

Read inside how it took her over a year to untangle the reports. Solving the snafu hinged on the letter M, on a single document, in a single database….

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A few short years ago I was a naive 21 year old girl named Corey O’Malley. Like dear reader Paul, I had a Capital One credit card with a modest credit limit. I thought nothing of it when my limit was never increased, but when I got declined for a Victoria’s Secret card — I mean, damn — I decided to see if there was something wrong. I went to freecreditreport.com (hey, the ads say its free!) and tried to order my credit report. Of course, this was my first mistake because freecreditreport.com is just a ploy by Experian (one of the credit reporting agencies) to get you to sign up for their $29.99/month credit monitoring BS. I believe there was a class action suit brought against them recently for their advertising methods. At this point, though, I had never even heard of Experian and didn’t realize what I was getting into. So, I filled out their forms, answered their clever little questions about my credit history, and was informed that for security reasons they would send me my credit report in the mail within 4 to 6 weeks. Months came and went and I forgot about it and life went on…

About six months later, I was researching new car insurance when a friend recommended that I take a look at my credit score, since car insurance companies use credit scores to determine how badly they are going to gouge each customer. At this point, I remembered that I had already ordered a credit report, but never heard anything back from Experian. So, I gave them a call. After waiting for about an hour, I spoke to someone (presumably in Bangalore) who informed me that they could mail a second copy of the report to my address on file. It also never arrived and a few weeks later I called back to complain again. I realized that there was a problem when they told me that they couldn’t understand why I hadn’t received either report because they had sent them directly to my home in Efland, North Carolina. Except that I didn’t live in North Carolina, I lived in the state of Washington. I panicked. Fraud! Someone was trying to steal my pristine identity! I demanded that they send a copy of “my” credit report to my home address in Washington and placed a security alert on my file.

When the report arrived, I scoured it. Almost everything was at least partially incorrect. My date of birth was a few years off and my previous home addresses had been superseded by addresses in North Carolina. My bank accounts and student loans were mixed in with the bank accounts and student loans of another person. But it didn’t look like fraud. Only one account was overdue and the balance was only $100 on a medical bill. All of the revolving accounts were current, all the student loans were in repayment and on time. If I didn’t know better, I would have believed this was the real credit report of a real American in her early twenties. Except for the two social security numbers, which was a little odd.

I called Experian back to find out how I could contest my credit report. I compiled every paper I could find that demonstrated my name, Social Security number, and legal residence. Of course, the problem wasn’t proving who I WAS, but proving who I WASN’T. No one gives you a Social Security card saying that you are NOT SS# XXX-XX-XXXX. No bank will provide a piece of paper that says you don’t have an account with them. I know because I tried. And I tried because Experian told me to. The formal position of the financial institutions is that they simply report information to the credit agencies, but are not responsible for what happens to the information once it reaches a credit report. Of course, the formal position of the credit reporting agencies is that they simply report information furnished by financial institutions, but are not responsible for the quality of this content. So, they think nothing of producing a credit report that includes two Social Security numbers, one of a girl born in Pennsylvania and one of a boy born in North Carolina.

Experian declined my request for a correction of my credit report. TransUnion and Equifax followed suit. I soon realized that nothing would be corrected until I found out the source of the error.

Tracking down my male counterpart was by far the easiest part of this entire ordeal. Armed with a name, Social Security number, address, and the internet, it took less than a day to find Corey O’Malley’s mother and convince her to give me her son’s cell phone number. It helped that we had something in common. I grew up in the same part of North Carolina and Corey and I had attended the same summer camp in North Carolina in the early 90s. We were, obviously, the only two Corey O’Malleys at camp, so it stood out pretty well in my memory. Pretty big coincidence, I know. I’ll get back to that in a bit.

Corey was very polite when I spoke to him, and more than a little embarrassed to find out that I couldn’t get a credit card because of his unpaid medical bills. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t even aware that there was any debt. I gave him the limited information that I had about the debt, and he promised to pay the balance. At this point, I went back to school and left this mess alone for a few months.

When summer rolled around, I contacted the collection agency that held “our” debt and informed them of my problem. I gave them Corey’s Social Security number, thinking that they could call up “our” account using his ID. There was no such account. Nervously, I gave them my social security number. I was shocked to hear that there was a match. The medical bill from UNC was in my name and my Social Security number. I asked to speak to a manager. The manager politely explained that as long as there was a bill in my name and my Social Security number, there was no way that they would remove the entry. The formal position of the collection agency is that they simply report information furnished by creditors, but are not responsible for the quality of the content. Deja vu. If I wanted to change the record, they explained, I would have to contact the original creditor. Of course, I didn’t know who that was and I didn’t want to bother Corey for the details, so I asked if they would please send me a copy of my bill. “I don’t know why you would want that, hon,” drawled the manager, “you paid the remaining balance a few months back and the account is closed.” I ‘calmly’ explained that I did not pay the bill, the other Corey O’Malley — the real Corey O’Malley — paid the bill, but that the account was still on my credit report. “But that’s you, innit hon? Corey O’Malley?” Apparently, in this woman’s mind, Corey and I are the first two people to ever share the same first and last name. (How horrible must it be to be named John Smith?)

In order to convince the manager to send me the collection account record, I had to formally switch the address of the account from Corey’s Efland, NC address to my Seattle, WA address. I made it clear that I would accept no grief the next time I called and someone said “But we have YOUR address on our files!” before grudgingly giving up my address. When the records arrived, I spent about a week calling every fucking department of UNC hospitals and leaving a message for every administrator with a public extension. Eventually, one called me back. Her first reaction was predictable. The formal position of the university medical center is that they simply refer their outstanding accounts to a collection agency, but are not responsible for anything that happens to anyone’s credit report. This did not answer the question of why UNC sent my Social Security number to a collection agency for emergency medical services rendered in Chapel Hill, NC at a time when I was attending high school in the Seattle area. But again, how does one prove a negative? How could I prove that I wasn’t in North Carolina in 2001? How could I prove that I wasn’t admitted to UNC hospital? A signature isn’t required for emergency medical service, so there was no way to verify that the person who checked in wasn’t me.

Except that I was very, very lucky. My parents, in their wisdom, gave their daughter a predominantly male name. The person who checked into the hospital was male. I asked the administrator if she could use the medical records to verify whether the person admitted to the hospital was male or female. She offered to call me back.

When I heard back from her again, her tone was more conciliatory. She changed the records and informed the collection agency that the account should be deleted (since Corey was not fairly notified of his bill, his credit would not be adversely affected). The problem came down to a confusion on the hospital’s apostrophe policy. At the time that Corey was admitted to UNC hospital, the computer system was phasing out the use of the apostrophe in patient’s names. Unfortunately, whomever checked-in Corey at the hospital was not aware of this new policy, and typed O’Malley, Corey into the computer instead of OMalley, Corey. Because there was only one match in the system — an entry from the “apostrophe era” — it automatically assumed that the two were the same. The Chapel Hill Public Library made a similar mistake when I was about nine, but it seemed a little more amusing then. Unlike libraries, however, medical records include details — like gender — that are sort of difficult to work around.

Within another four months — capitalism is alarmingly slow — my credit reports were finally correct again. In the end, Corey and I had our credit reports — our very financial identities — completely merged because of one medical bill with his home address but my social security number. I spent hundreds of dollars fixing the errors and lost thousands of dollars in credit that I really could have used during the lean years of my youth. It is easy to say that what happened was just a minor clerical error made by a hospital, but the structure of our economic system allowed a minor clerical error to balloon into a credit score 300 points lower than it should have been. I am not a stupid person — I graduated from college with a 4.0 and highest honors — but it took me months even to figure out what I was supposed to do in this sort of situation. There are procedures in place for identity theft, but what do you do in the case of an identity crisis? Every single actor fed me the same line; that they were not at fault and someone else was legally responsible. Alarmingly there actually is legislation that speaks to these issues — the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Of course, the loopholes are so big you can fit the headquarters of all three credit reporting agencies with room to spare. Essentially, the law institutionalizes the attitude that everyone should just pass the buck to the next guy because the consumer has barely any legal rights to protect him or her. I later spoke to an attorney who specializes in consumer law and he told me that, in his experience, if I had not had the smoking gun medical records showing the gender discrepancy I might never have had the records changed. If a bank had accidentally confused the boy-Corey with a pre-existing record for the girl-Corey, such a error might never be corrected.

Since this happened, I’ve talked to a lot of people with similar stories. One woman told me of the three years it took her to have her husband’s credit records separated from those of his father AND grandfather. In her case, the smoking gun was the fact that most of the old accounts on the record were from long before her husband was born.

Another acquaintance explained that she was forced to sue her mother for identity theft because her mother deliberately tricked the credit reporting agencies into fusing her identity with that of her minor daughter. All of these cases could be so easily prevented if the credit reporting agencies, financial institutions, and other institutions that use sensitive financial information were held accountable for their use (and misuse) of such information. Two social security numbers? Should be a big red flag, eh? Mortgages from before someone was born? You’d think that would catch some attention. Sadly, no.

And that is my sob story. A little long for a blog tip, but it truly was my worst experience as a consumer. And it will probably happen again the next time I break my toe on vacation in North Carolina or he decides to get a facelift in LA (my new home). Good times!

Corey O’Malley

— BEN POPKEN

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