Credit Reports

It is a common occurrence to have errors in credit reports. Someone with an identical name as yours may have committed a liable offence and the information is recorded against your name. Some other person may have died and for one reason or the other the information gets into your report. It could be that an account which does not belong to you is put in your record. The issue of the error may not crop up until you decide to apply for a mortgage, car loan, or credit and you find out that you cannot access the facility because your report is filled with accounts of other people who bear similar names with you. How do you avoid being a victim of this problem and set the record straight? What process do you go through to get your report to become accurate? Here are a few tips which can assist you to overcome the problem.

CHECK YOUR CREDIT HISTORY REGULARLY

Ensure that you regularly check your credit history. An error in your record may mean that you might be turned down by the creditor, an employer, or other people who may need a report for one thing or the other. To forestall the possibility of having an error, you must regularly ask for your report, and you must look out for errors.

FIX THE ERRORS

It is not enough to look for errors alone, you should also put in motion initiatives to have them corrected in case they are present in your record. The first thing to do after discovering inaccurate information is to gather the documentation on the item or items that support your view that there has been a mistake in the report. Along with the copies (not originals) of the documents, you can file your complaint by a certified letter to the consumer reporting companies and your creditors, not forgetting to include your social security number, date of birth, name, address, and other relevant information. You may also file your dispute through the phone and the web.

CONTENT OF LETTER

The content of the certified letter must also contain the name of the company that wrongly provided the information to the credit reporting bureau as well as the nature of the transaction on the item that generates the dispute. The letter should also ask for corrections to be made about the inaccurate information contained on the record and a change in any personal information which is in error.

UNRESOLVED DISPUTE

Sometimes, the issue has not been resolved to your satisfaction or settled in your favor and you may be thinking of taking a legal action to clear your name and ensure that your record is clean. There is no law in that says you cannot take legal action over the issue. In that case, you should ask the credit bureau to file all the documents with respect to the dispute in your record for future reference. You will do yourself some good by keeping the documents in a safe place.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.