Corporate Death to Equifax!
After failing to protect the personal data of over 145 million Americans, credit reporting company Equifax is still operating with what seems like impunity.
Equifax’s blunder calls for the corporate death penalty, through a rare but vital procedure called judicial dissolution.
Under the law of Georgia, where Equifax is incorporated, the state attorney general may file a lawsuit in state court to dissolve a corporation if the corporation “has continued to exceed or abuse the authority conferred upon it by law.” (All 50 states have similar provisions.) State attorneys general don’t invoke these corporate death penalty statutes often, especially not against large, well-known corporations. But Equifax could not have obtained its unusually important position in our economy without the privileges of a corporate charter conferred by law, and it has forfeited its claim to those privileges.
It is quite likely that many, if not most, of the people that the Equifax breach has affected aren’t aware of what has happened, and haven’t even heard of the company.
Equifax’s entire reason for existence is to collect and maintain private financial data about individuals who are not its customers. This isn’t like other data breaches, such as the 2012 credit card data breach at Barnes & Noble, or the 2015 hack of frequent-flyer account data at British Airways. Those breaches were bad. But they affected people who had chosen to do business with these companies by buying books or airplane trips. Most of the people whose data was compromised by Equifax’s lax security don’t even know that Equifax exists, let alone that it maintains their private financial data.
Equifax had one job, and it failed. More than half of American adults woke up one day to learn that a corporation that few had ever heard of had lost control of financial data that they never knowingly gave it.
We shouldn’t use the corporate death penalty lightly. But at this point, Equifax has lost its justification for existence.
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