subject: Credit Repair: More Than Credit Bureau Disputes [print this page] Credit bureau disputes are at the core of most credit repair efforts and for some consumers and even professional credit repair companies, their credit repair efforts start and end here. For some, this can be an effective strategy.
When you are disputing a negative item on your credit reports with a credit reporting agency (credit bureau), you are essentially saying "I don't feel this negative item is being reported fairly and I would like for you to perform an investigation in order to verify that it should be included in my credit file." This can be done by filling out and submitting a form on the credit bureau's website, by phone, or by mail, which is the recommended method. After receiving your dispute, the credit bureau first has to determine whether your dispute is legitimate or is "frivolous or irrelevant" (exactly what this means is at the discretion of the bureau). The legitimate disputes are then investigated by contacting the original furnisher of the reported information and requesting that the verify the listing is correct. The credit bureau have 30 days (although they tend to stretch this out) to perform this investigation after which they must delete the negative item if the original furnisher is unable or unwilling to verify its accuracy.
In many cases, credit bureau disputes are much more successful at removing negative items from your credit report than you would expect. Aside from the fact that many credit reports contain errors that cannot be verified, the fact that many information furnishers simply don't have the capacity or the desire to respond to credit bureau verification requests means that disputed items are frequently deleted even when they describe something like a late payment or repossession that actually happened.
On the other hand, when a negative item ends up on your credit report because a creditor has bad information on their books (they say you were late on a payment when you never were), credit bureau disputes may be worthless when it comes to getting this error removed from your credit report. The credit bureau receives your dispute, requests verification from the original creditor, they check their inaccurate records and verify the negative listing, and you are no closer to having that inaccurate negative credit listing removed than when you started.
While credit bureau disputes may be effective, you could make the argument that they don't work well. Credit bureau disputes can result in accurate negative information being removed from your credit reports while genuine errors continue to count against your credit score.
So what can you do if you have errors on your credit reports that keep getting verified and remain listed on your credit reports? You evolve to the next phase of credit repair which is dealing directly with the furnishers of the information in your credit reports. It's time to bypass the credit bureaus and talk to the lenders, credit card companies, and courts that are reporting to them.
There are a number of tactics for getting your creditors to stop reporting negative information about you to the credit bureaus ranging from simply asking nicely for them to remove the listing from your credit report (goodwill negotiations), to more forcibly demanding that they prove to you that what they are reporting is accurate (information requests), to forcing them to jump through certain hoops to prove you owed them a debt in the first place (debt validation). When combined with credit bureau disputes, this full arsenal of credit repair tactics tends to produce the best results helping you remove more negative items from your credit reports in less time. For this reason, it is little surprise that most of the major credit repair companies offer direct creditor interventions along with standard credit bureau disputes.
