60 Minutes ‘the ONE thing to know about your credit report’ 2.10.13
Feb 10, 2013 60 Minutes did an amazing story on the inept practices of the credit reporting agencies (CRA) Equifax, Experian and Trans Union. Correspondent, Steve Kroft, shared that 40 million mistakes a year are made; 20 million of them are significant and are nearly impossible to remove.
60 Minutes went on to say that one out of five credit reports contain an error; one out of ten credit reports have a lower score because of the error(s). When you are discussing an industry that has financial consequences and can inflict an emotional toll on our lives, this is a travesty!
Credit Team has years of experience correcting the information on credit reports. The CRA have made the dispute process a maze. If you don’t know how to approach the CRA, they will ‘run you in circles!’ It shouldn’t be a difficult process, but their money is not made responding to you, it is made providing information to potential creditors, employers, etc . Their energy and time is not focused on the consumer’s concerns.
Currently Experian is responding to almost 100% of the disputes they receive with a one page letter which begins: “We have received a suspicious request…” In our years of experience, we have seen Experian do this quite often. If you don’t respond to this letter in an appropriate manner, Experian will not even consider your dispute concern(s).
One woman in the 60 Minutes report spent six years fighting to eradicate an alias on her reports. While this is unusual, we have successfully fought and corrected the identity for our clients. Most of these were father/son, junior/senior situations. You would think, with a different date of birth and social security number, this would be an easy fix. Using a specific set of steps we do get results for our clients.
60 Minutes interviewed three former dispute employees and they verified what we have known for years … the employee must process an insurmountable amount of disputes every day, the employee is very limited in the information they intake, very limited in the information they submit regarding the account that is being questioned. There is no personalization to the process and the employee is not really able to make a decision based on the information the consumer provides. This is why the attorneys highlighted in this 60 Minutes episode stated ‘information is not forwarded to creditors; the dispute process fails to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). ‘
You do have an advocate. Credit Team has corrected and updated thousands of credit reports.