Forget "Am I my brother's keeper?"

How 'bout, "Am I my brother?" The good folks at Experian seemed to think so.

I got my free copy of my credit report from each of the 3 bureaus, like I do every year. I should have known right away there'd be trouble. When you request them online, for each bureau, one of the security features - to ensure you're who you say you are and are requesting your own report - is to ask you to correctly provide the monthly payment from one of the items on your report. The item Experian asked me about was a mortgage from some bank or other, opened in 2003, I think it was. It was not my mortgage bank. I didn't have a mortgage till 2006. Not good. If you don't give the right answers online, they make you request a paper report, which I got some time later.

It listed all of my information. It also listed what appeared to be all of my brother's information. Our first names are similar. I can kind of, sort of see what happened. Sort of. Every item on the report has a name and an address attached to it. You would think... at least I would think... that their information system would be able to recognize that there could be a definite line of demarcation, on one side of which would be a group of items with all of his name variations, all of his address history and his SSN, and on the other side of which would be a group of items with all of my name variations, all of my address history and my SSN. It took me just a couple of minutes to figure out manually, having to flip through 14 or so pages of their report.

I would have hoped that an organization that can have so much influence over our lives, dictating what credit is available to us and at what price, would have an information system that would allow them to be a little more careful than that. I told them as much, not in those exact words, in my letter to them in which I disputed the items on the report that were not mine. I also advised my brother that he should pull his report and dispute any items that weren't his (I was assuming all of my information would be on his report as well). I figured if there were 2 disputes - mine saying all of his stuff was wrong, and his saying all of my stuff was wrong - maybe they'd get the hint.

Fortunately, with or without his input, they figured it out in short order. They deleted all of his items from my report. I'll be interested to see what shows up next year.

I'm also quite disturbed by the whole thing. These bureaus have quite a bit of control over our lives. I fortunately had no difficulty in fixing my problem, but what if they hadn't done it so quickly or easily? We bought a car recently, with a loan. Fortunately, the lending bank pulled a report that didn't have all the errors (tho another bank shortly afterward sent us a letter saying they couldn't extend us a car loan because I have too much outstanding credit). I can't help but wonder how many people don't look at all 3 reports every year, and what errors might be on some of their reports. How many are denied credit, or pay more in interest than the otherwise would, because of those errors?