If you have damaging credit showing on your credit you may have considered credit repair as an option. It has been projected that as many as 75% of all credit reports hold errors or inaccuracies. The FCRA or the Fair Credit Reporting Act is a federal law that was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1970 to encourage the fairness, accuracy and privacy of personal information on credit reports. This act has given consumers the right to dispute inexact and unreasonable information.
You can dispute errors on your credit report and the lenders and credit bureaus have a specific quantity of time to verify the validity of the information or it must be removed from your account. You can do credit repair by submitting the disputes on your own or you can engage the services of a professional credit repair company.
However, be attentive that the Federal Trade Commission states explicitly on their website that “No one can legally remove accurate and timely negative information from a credit report. The law allows you to ask for an investigation of information in your file that you dispute as inaccurate or incomplete”.
This statement seems to be very straightforward and it is one motive why credit repair critics try to dissuade you from trying to repair your credit by convincing you that credit repair is futile. Yet, the fact is that you can make noteworthy changes to your credit score and your credit report by taking steps to repair your credit.
However upfront it may seem, there is quite a bit of haziness in the FTC quotation when it comes to real people and real credit reports. Since it is predictable that up to 75% of all credit reports contain mistakes, credit repair companies can offer a great service. If you have a great deal of time and energy on your hands you might want to just submit the disputes on the false credit yourself, however, especially in this day and age, you may not have the time or the energy to devote to such a task.
Also, who defines what information is “accurate and timely”? Often mistakes and miscommunications happen between consumers and lenders. Something that is considered “accurate” may not be that at all when the full story is discovered.
Also, many credit reports have listings that belong to someone else, duplicate entries, listings that have been on the report for longer than 7 years and even listings that are the consequence of identity theft. These things need to be removed from your credit before they cause you unwarranted problems.
You have the right to dispute anything on your credit that you suppose to be misleading, ambiguous, unverifiable, biased or questionable. Intermittently there may even be issues that the lender believes are accurate but that you were never able to stand up for yourself from because your side of the story was never told. Lenders don’t always get things right just as consumers also make mistakes. That is one grounds why it is so fundamental to have the chance to be able to dispute anything on your report that is inaccurate, untimely, misleading, incomplete, ambiguous or questionable either on your own or with the support of a professional credit repair service.
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