John Ulzheimer, president of education services for Credit.com, has an interesting take on one of the sources of the mortgage crisis. Inflated credit scores are to blame, he told me last week.

I always wondered what it really means to repair one’s credit. And what’s going on when companies promise to optimize your credit score.

The only way I know to fix up your credit score is to fix it. To do the right things, like pay bills on time and don’t draw down your lines of credit too heavily.

Ulzheimer clued me in on the system in which credit repair firms or law firms that do credit repair partner with mortgage brokers or lenders. They are paid, by fees or subscriptions, to raise applicants’ credit scores so the applicants can qualify for a loan. The broker, of course, can’t earn a commission unless the deal goes through and the lender makes his or her money only then, too.

Some of the tactics he said a credit repair firm might use would be to get negative information removed from a file – which is completely legitimate – even though the lender may put the information back on at a later date. Or the firm might convince consumers to shift some debt to a business credit card. I’ve noticed ideas on line that go way beyond that, to the point of even encouraging people to get different Social Security numbers to help them hide bad debts.

Score goes up, loan gets approved. But is it a solid deal? “If my score really is 580 and all of a sudden it becomes 650, how will the loan perform when it gets approved?” Ulzheimer asks. A risky borrower will act like a risky borrower no matter how good the score looked at one time.

His point: “The credit scoring system is broken.” And it is being gamed all too frequently. He said TransUnion has estimated 30 to 50 percent of its requests to remove negative information from credit records come from credit repair firms.

His solution: Change federal laws to close loopholes that don’t require law firms and mortgage firms to meet standards set for credit repair. And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should refuse to accept loans in which scores have been “optimized.” Both the major mortgage industry giants should require lenders to show them a chronology of all credit scores that the lender pulled during the application period.