You should pull your credit reports and review them for inaccurate or unverifiable information.
These are two separate concepts. Inaccurate information can include things that don’t belong to you, negative items that are reporting beyond the 7.5-year mark from the date of first delinquency, or any other information that is just plain wrong. Unverifiable information is that which the furnisher of the information cannot verify. Furnishers include banks and other lenders who report information on your credit report. If a furnisher has gone out of business but it continues to report negative information on your credit report, you can dispute it and most likely, have it removed.
Send a dispute letter to the credit bureau disputing inaccurate or unverifiable information.
You must send your letter to the credit bureau and not the furnisher, to trigger your rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”). This statute is the law that gives you rights against the furnisher and credit bureaus if they don’t do what they are supposed to do for you. (Be patient, I will discuss this in the next step).
When you write your dispute letter, be sure to identify the tradeline, and the related account number and state specifically how it’s inaccurate. Also, be sure to attach any supporting documentation to your letter that can help prove your point.
Both the credit bureau and the furnisher must conduct a reasonable reinvestigation.
Once the credit bureau receives your dispute letter, it must forward notification of your letter to the furnisher. Then, they both must conduct a reasonable reinvestigation into your dispute. The more supporting information you attach to your letter, the higher they must-see if you are right. There is at least one exception to this rule. If they deem your dispute to be frivolous (for example, you disputed the same debt a few months before, or you disputed everything negative on your credit report), then they have no obligation to investigate anything.
The credit bureau must provide you with the results of its investigation within 30 days.
If fails to do so, it must remove the disputed tradeline or collection item. Sometimes, a credit bureau will not get a response from the furnisher before the 30-day period expires and merely remove the item from the credit report until a later date when the furnisher does respond. In any case, once you get the results of the reinvestigation, if they are not in your favor, you have a serious decision to make. Do you sue the credit bureaus and furnishers to remove the inaccurately reporting information or do you just live with it? If the latter, then you are essentially admitting that the disputed information is accurate. At that point, you will have to live with it.
If you decide to sue to get a negative item removed, your best move is to stop representing yourself and turn the matter over to a credit repair lawyer.
The credit bureaus and furnishers all have lawyers from very large law firms. These lawyers get a steady diet of defending these cases and they, on balance are very astute. If you think about filing your own lawsuit, I can tell you that of the thousands of cases that I have read over the years, the ones that have consumers representing themselves almost always lose. It was not for lack of facts or passion for their own case, mind you. They lost their case because the defense attorneys know the law, the nuances of it, and the civil procedure better than the consumer.
Conclusion
If you are trying to legitimately clean up your credit report from inaccurately reporting information, you should contact us at Identity Theft Law Group. We have been fixing credit reports since 2008. Visit us at www.idtheftlawgroup.com or call us at (404) 591-6680 or email us at [email protected] We are happy to look at your credit reports for free and give you our opinion as to how we can help.
Join our 3 for Free program and we will send out up to 3 dispute letters for you for free. You can also join our Auto Pilot program and we will pull your credit reports for free every two months to make sure that they stay free of inaccurately reporting information.