Disreputable corporate executives nationwide are bowing in thanks for Equifax, the credit reporting bureau responsible for the most damaging data breach in American history. Hackers stole Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses, credit card and driver’s license numbers of 143 million people—more than half the adult population in the U.S., and about three-quarters of all Americans with a credit history. And then Equifax, reeling from its third major data breach in a year, made matters even worse.

While the company discovered the problem July 29, they hid it from victims for six weeks. Before that disclosure, three Equifax executives sold $1.8 million in company stock, and there were also abnormally large sales of stock options, suggesting insider tip-offs. Equifax didn’t initially tell its own customer service staff about the breach, but key shareholders appeared to get the message. And if you, the victim, wanted to learn if you were affected, you had to give Equifax more personal information to an insecure WordPress site that looked like something an identity thief would create to trick you into handing over your personal information.

The site, Equifaxsecurity2017.com, pushed victims to a sign up for a credit monitoring service that initially forced users to give up their right to a class-action lawsuit, precisely the corporate immunity maneuver that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is trying to ban. (Equifax has since stripped this out.) Initially, Equifax offered the monitoring service for free only for a year, and would charge $19.95 a month thereafter and require users to opt out, meaning the company was trying to take advantage of their own mistake to try to make money. Here, too, company reversed course under pressure.

This parade of missteps and the fact that Equifax failed at its only job, the storage of consumer financial data, has many rightly wondering why we should not pull out the corporate death penalty and end this company’s existence. But I have a bigger question: Why do we have an oligopoly of three major credit-reporting companies who hoard your sensitive personal information? In fact, why do we have credit reporting companies at all?

Equifax began its corporate existence in the 1890s as the Retail Credit Company, a private investigator. Business clients would ask for personal information on individuals, not just financial history but political activity, marital problems, even sex lives. Your race or religion could dock your “score,” which was as tied up with character as it was creditworthiness.