“The buck stops here”; the ultimate statement of accountability and one rarely uttered by people anymore. Despite all the bucks flying to Washington, few of them are stopping there. There seems to be a desperate shortage of accountability in DC.

Accountability is a built-in governor to our actions. Trying to live a life without accountability is like trying to drive a car without a steering wheel. Sure, you’re gonna go places but not with any specific direction. It's easy to see how life could become a series of accidents that you are involved in with no understanding of why they occurred and no ability to prevent them in the future. Where accountability has been removed, either through oversight, trickery or a misguided effort to be compassionate, in essence your steering wheel has been taken away.

Perhaps there is an overall misunderstanding about what accountability means. Accountability is not about blame. It is about understanding that your actions have consequences and accepting those consequences. It is a mistake to view those consequences as punishment. They should be a learning experience. They should teach you not to do that again. This is the message we should teach our children about accountability.

Accountabilityand trust are interwtined. The great thing about it is that, when you accept responsibility for your actions, it is much easier for others to trust you going forward. By shirking their accountability, those in DC don't learn to change their actions and thus lose our trust. Alas, accountability seems to be an ephemeral quality.

Consider the credit rating bureaus. Let's ignore for the moment that I neither asked for nor authorized any of them to track my credit information and rate me. Here are three businesses that make money off of me. I have no official relationship with them, and they are not accountable to me. Yet their ability to direct my life is enormous. While there is some official regulation that forces them to have a modicum of accountability to the debtor, they make you painfully aware of how small that is if you ever try to deal with them to get information changed. Let's face it. There is very little trust in this scenario.

On the other side are the creditors who have very little accountability to me with regards to the credit bureaus. They can put in information that they themselves admit is incorrect, and yet they have no incentive to correct it, or at least correct it in a timely manner. Accountability should mean that there would be a negative consequence for them putting in incorrect information and a positive consequence for them correcting it.

I offer for example an error that occurred with us over 20¢ owed to a national tire company. We had paid off a one-year-same-as-cash loan for a set of tires based on the last statement that we got. Their records, for some reason or another, differed by 20¢. During this period of time we happened to move. We never bothered informing them of our new address because as far as we were concerned we were done with that contract and had paid in full. The tire company then proceeded to send us bills for the remaining 20¢. Obviously we were no longer at the address they had on file. Somehow, possibly through the post office’s forwarding system, they incorrectly updated our address to Dover Delaware when we in fact we lived in Dover New Hampshire. That 20¢, as you can imagine, became compounded with interest, late fees and eventually penalties. By the time this came to light, when we applied for a new mortgage, the amount owed had risen to approximately $250. And because of their report to the credit bureaus our ability to get a new mortgage was now somewhat in question.

I contend that we were all accountable for our actions and all of us had some role in making this happen this way. We should have looked for confirmation that our bill was paid in full. The post office should have supplied the correct address (if in fact the error was theirs). The tire company should have attempted to find a correct address when those reminder statements to Dover, Delaware kept getting returned to sender. The problem we discovered, however, was that the only one who was accountable for anything in this was us. We had to contact the tire company to find out what happened. We had to make the effort (5 times) to get them to change our address. We had to follow up with them to make sure that they filed the appropriate revision to the credit report showing that we had taken care of this. Their official statement to the credit bureau simply said that we had finally paid the account in full. There was no mention of their role in the delinquency of it.

If I am going to be fully accountable for my credit, I should be able to select the credit bureau that I would like to use as my main bureau. I would then enter into a contract with that bureau, and they would be accountable to me as a customer. I would have control (to some extent) over the accuracy of my file. If pulling a credit reports is going to count against me, I should have some control over who does it and how often it is pulled. They would not authorize any new credit issuance without my express approval. (Think of what this would do to rates of identity theft.) The credit bureau would become an integral agent in keeping my file accurate and helping to maximize my credit score.

Creditors also would be more accountable for their actions. Much like a series of late payments on a debtor’s part hurts them, a creditor who consistently puts bad information into credit files would be "dinged" by the bureau. Noting that their records indicate the creditor has a bad history of providing incorrect information which they then have to spend a lot of time cleaning up, future credit pulls or notes would be charged to that creditor at a higher rate. The bureau would be accountable to me so that I would not be the victim of a sloppy or lazy creditor. The creditor would be accountable to the bureau for supplying accurate information. And I would finally be truly accountable for my credit rating.

Perhaps all of this is already done, but there is so much cloak and dagger surrounding the bureaus that the average person can not be sure of how they operate. The whole business has the general air of guilt until innocence is proven.

A final note on the tire episode -- we were able to go ahead with the mortgage because the tire company provided us with a letter stating that the account had finally been settled for an amount that was a compromise between the 20¢ of the $250. Six months later, however, they still had not filed the appropriate paperwork with the credit bureaus and we had to follow up with them yet again. We were surprised (although we shouldn't have been at that point) that there was still a note in their records stating that this account was outstanding. The operator who answered the phone asked, in a snotty tone, if we didn't know that we needed to pay our bills. We shot back and asked if she didn't know that her company needed to keep accurate records and needed to change our address, which was still listed as Dover Delaware, to Dover New Hampshire. She got a little flustered, but that was nothing compared to how flustered she got when we asked to speak to the vice president by name since we had his signature on a letter in front of us stating that this account had been paid in full. So much for accountability.