| These regulations evidently give relief to nationwide CRA's from the requirement that they have adequate capacity to provide consumers free reports when there is an extraordinary volume of requests. In those circumstances, the proposed rule would permit nationwide CRA's to ask consumers to return to the centralized source at a later time. What's to stop the credit agencies from always claiming they are overburdened and delaying delivering the reports indefinitely? This defeats the purpose of giving consumers timely access to their records. If someone's identity was stolen and they had to wait an extended period to find out, the damage is long since done and costly to both the consumer and federal agencies. Maybe it would be wise to put a nominal handling charge on the report requests that would not be too burdensome to the average consumer, but would provide financial support to the credit agencies so they could not claim they did not have sufficient resources to meet peak demand. |