Quick Summary
Recently, TransUnion and Sterling (previously Acxiom) have been experiencing numerous errors, which have impacted many of our CRAs when trying to dispatch credit report searches to these vendors. These errors occurred on the vendor side, and TazWorks remained fully functional during these times. However, we’ve worked with TransUnion and Sterling to understand the cause of these issues and want to provide more information about what they are doing to resolve them.
TransUnion dispatching errors
When you initially set up your account with TransUnion, they gave you a member code (also known as a subscriber code), which they expect to receive in a very specific format. If they receive one that varies in any way from this standard, which can happen if the code was entered wrong or if their system flags it for any other reason, it can cause issues. While it will allow the request to go through for a period of time, once a threshold has been met, it will begin blacklisting that member code. This is what some of our clients began experiencing late Friday afternoon.
TazWorks worked closely with TransUnion’s upper level support on Friday evening to better understand the issue and help them resolve it, and TransUnion deployed updates on their side yesterday to prevent this problem from arising again.
Sterling dispatching errors
Sterling provides credit data by accessing TransUnion directly through their own software, then sharing that data with TazWorks. At times, they are unable to connect with TransUnion because their server is down or they encounter other problems when pulling credit.
Late in June, Sterling had a major outage with their service that made them unable to access TransUnion data and thus deliver it to TazWorks CRAs using the Sterling implementation, even though TazWorks remained operational and able to receive this data. Because this issue was within Sterling’s software and is related to how Sterling connects with TransUnion, TazWorks was unable to address the issue directly.
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We realize issues like these can be extremely frustrating to you, and we do everything we can to keep you informed on the status of these outages, regardless of whether they happen on the TazWorks side or with a vendor. To make sure you always have the latest information, you can subscribe to system performance and any service interruptions on our status page. You can subscribe to updates via text message to get an alert whenever an update is posted.
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