Your Money: An $18 Million Lesson in Handling Credit Report Errors

That indifference should surprise no one who has ever tried to deal with any of the three big credit reporting agencies, Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. “You feel trapped, like you are in a box,” said Ms. Miller, a 57-year-old nurse who works in a dermatologist’s office. “You have no control over this, and you can’t call them up and say, ‘You’re fired.’ ”

So she tried suing. That worked.

A jury in Federal District Court in Portland, Ore., last week awarded her a whopping $18.4 million in punitive damages, which, according to consumer lawyers, is the largest individual case on record.

If you think this has taught Equifax and the other credit reporting companies a lesson, you are a lot more optimistic than close observers of the industry. They say that despite the huge judgment, little is going to change for the millions of Americans who discover errors in their credit reports.

The credit bureaus are willing to tolerate these errors — and settle with consumers out of court — as a cost of doing business, according to credit experts and lawyers who work on these cases.

“Their business model is to keep doing the same thing over and over again,” said Justin Baxter, the lead lawyer on Ms. Miller’s case. “They can buy off a number of consumers with small dollar amounts and get rid of the vast majority of cases. To Equifax, that’s the cost of doing business.”

Ms. Miller made every effort to fix her report, exactly as consumers are advised to do. She initiated the company’s dispute process about seven times, and in most instances, Equifax would spit back a form letter saying it needed more proof of her identity. So she sent her pay stub and her phone bill. When that didn’t work, she sent her pay stub and her driver’s license. And when that failed, she sent her W-2 form and an insurance bill — at least three times.

But nothing ever changed: Ms. Miller, a model financial citizen who once had the credit score to prove it, had become mixed up with another, much less creditworthy Julie Miller. After she was denied a line of credit from KeyBank, she discovered 38 collection accounts on her credit report, none of which belonged to her, along with an inaccurate Social Security number and birth date. Her financial life was no longer her own.

Mixed files, as they are known in the credit industry, most frequently involve people who share common names with individuals who have similar Social Security numbers, birth dates or addresses. These errors are notorious for being among the most difficult to fix, credit experts said, and require human intervention to untangle the mess. But given the huge number of disputes, the process to address them is largely automated. And that is the excuse the industry advances to consumers who get stuck in its web.

The bureaus often outsource thousands of disputes daily to workers overseas. Those workers, often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases, are largely told to translate the problem into a two- or three-digit code that defines the gist of the problem (account not his/hers, for instance) and feed it into a computer.

But that process won’t untangle a mixed credit report. The reason files become mixed to begin with can be traced back to the computer formula the bureaus use to match credit data to a specific person’s credit report. It allows credit data, say a late payment on a credit card, to be inserted into a person’s file even if the identifying information isn’t an exact match. In other words, the system might add a late payment to the credit report of someone like Julie Miller even if the Social Security number is off by two digits or a birth date is off by two years, but enough of the other identifying information matches. That’s roughly what happened to Ms. Miller.

Partial matches aren’t always wrong, of course. Solid estimates on the number of mixed files are hard to find, though a 2004 study from the Federal Trade Commission said that partial matches occurred in about 1 to 2 percent of credit files, citing data from the bureaus. That might not sound like much, but when you consider that there are 200 million individuals with credit files at each of the big three bureaus, that translates to two million to four million consumers.

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

Economic Scene: Mexico’s 1980s Austerity Experience Holds Lesson for Europe

His approach to economics was unorthodox but creative. He tried to raise oil prices by sheer force of will — firing the director of the state oil company Pemex for having the temerity to reduce the price of Mexican crude as oil plummeted on international markets. He froze dollar accounts in local banks to try to stem capital flight.

But the canine defense didn’t work. In 1982, interest on the country’s foreign debt swallowed almost two-thirds of its export revenue. In February, the Mexican currency started plummeting. In August, Jesús Silva Herzog, Mexico’s finance minister, flew to Washington to tell Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve and Donald Regan at the Treasury Department that Mexico could not make its coming payments to American and other foreign banks.

Tweak a few of the details and Mexico in the 1980s looks a lot like most Southern European countries today. In Mexico’s case, runaway government spending in the 1970s, fueled by high oil prices and greased by foreign debt, threatened to bankrupt the country after the Fed sharply raised interest rates to curb rampant inflation in the United States, increasing Mexico’s interest payments even as oil prices crashed to earth.

Similarly, money poured into Spain and Greece when investors persuaded themselves that the bonds of all members of the euro zone should be as safe as Germany’s, the region’s most creditworthy country. In Greece, this allowed a government spending binge. In Spain it ignited a housing bubble. Both countries were left with an unbearable burden when the world economy hit a wall, creditors took flight and the money stopped.

European decision-making during the crisis of the last few years also shares some of the erratic nature of Mexican policy under President López Portillo. Cyprus was somehow allowed to threaten the euro area’s banking system. European leaders then “solved” the problem by imposing capital controls that — like those tried by Mexico — are unlikely to work and will undoubtedly provide new headaches down the road.

But the most relevant parallel is one that European leaders refuse to see. If there is one overwhelming lesson from the debt crisis that struck Mexico and other Latin American countries so hard three decades ago, it is that countries that cannot grow will not pay. It is up to creditors, too, to allow them to grow. It took Mexico and its lenders seven years to figure that out. The European crisis is in its fifth year. You would think they might have learned something by now, but no.

Mexicans remember what happened after Mr. Silva Herzog’s flight to Washington as the “lost decade.” Miguel de la Madrid, who took over as president the following December, promised deep budget cuts in exchange for bridge loans and debt rescheduling. That didn’t work, so Mexico cut a new deal, getting new loans from commercial banks, the United States and the International Monetary Fund, in exchange for cutting government payrolls and subsidies, selling state-run companies and opening the country to foreign trade.

I started college a little before Mr. Silva Herzog’s trip. In the five-plus years it took me to get a degree (Mexican degrees take longer) the Mexican economy contracted about 2 percent. By the time I got my graduate degree two years later, gross domestic product per person was 8 percent less than it had been in 1982.

Yet despite the enforced austerity, Mexico’s foreign debt in 1988 still amounted to 56.5 percent of Mexico’s economic output, more than it had six years before.

This must sound familiar to Europe’s unemployed. If anything it’s far worse there. The Greek economy has shrunk more than a fifth over the last five years. Government debt amounts to about 170 percent of the economy; it was 100 percent when the crisis started. The economies of Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy are smaller, too, than they were five years ago. Their debt burden is heavier. And still, European leaders insist that more of the same must be the solution.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @portereduardo