Maybe I just don’t understand insurance, but it seems if it’s something as simple as BASELINE $ AMOUNT times “x” accidents divided by “y” random divisor times “z” bad credit reports to the “nth” traffic tickets power minus a base logarithmic “a” late payments to the “bth” jaywalking tickets root over “c” identity thefts, it wouldn’t be that big a deal for other people to use it as their base formula…

(1) The proprietary information is important. The ability to beat one another with pricing is important. Whoever best assesses risk wins. They drive off the most risky customers and give better deals to the least risky. I think that this is why they pull in information from so many different sources to get a leg up on one another.

(2) Making it complicated makes people go away. Getting any and all information here has been like getting our teeth pulled. Knowing that we will never get the full story is quite dispiriting and makes us want to give up. The more people they get to give up, the better. So long as it doesn’t drive them away.

(3) It makes mistakes more difficult to catch. If they have something factually incorrect that’s costing us money and we find out where the mistake is, we can get it fixed. If we don’t know where the mistake is, we can’t. We just assume that it’s our fault and that we did something wrong because that’s what they tell us. For instance, if I attribute it to my speeding ticket, I stop asking questions. Everyone’s guilty of something and a lot of people will just assume that’s why their rates are so high.

(4) Making it more complicated allows them to jack up rates mysteriously. The fact that we signed on under the assumption that we were going to spend one amount when in actuality we’ll be spending 25% more than that amount means that they get business and a higher profit margin from two relatively safe drivers. If they’d told us we’d be paying this much, we would have gone with Salamander. By making it complicated, they made it easy not to tell us.

Someone else has stolen your wife’s SSN and used it in the past/present to get credit.

“Her” credit score - when you personally look it up and get ONLY the file where her name and SSN data match - looks fine.

The “subfile” - with the info from whoever ELSE has pulled credit using that number but a different name - has something bad in it.

When the insurance company runs their data, they are getting the ENTIRE file by looking up her SSN but not the SSN-Name check… but when they mail her report, they’re only mailing you the SSN-Name check.

You need a thorough investigation on this one. Contacting the credit bureaus and demanding their fraud investigators run an SSN-only check for you is a start.