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I work for a company that reports customer account activity to all 3 credit reporting agencies (Experian, TransUnion, EquiFax) which requires a lot of effort and opens us up to a lot of risk if care isn't exercised; which got me thinking:
Why as a business would you bother reporting to TransUnion and EquiFax when it seems like reporting to Experian alone would be enough. Would a credit score be hurt more by reporting the same non-payment to all 3 instead of just 1?
The reason you would want to report to all three is because lenders don't usually query all three. Thus, it may be that your negative mark will be missed by a future lender because that lender didn't query the agency you chose to report to.
Generally, it is cheaper to report to more agencies than to query more agencies, and since those reporting are also those querying, it is in their best interest to continue reporting to all agencies, and expecting others to do the same.
Each agency calculates the score independently based on the information reported to that agency. Thus only reporting a negative item to Experian will mean that TransUnion and Equifax scores for the same person will be higher.
