The key under the Fair Credit Reporting Act if you find any errors on your credit report, you have to send the disputes directly to the credit reporting agencies, and the big three would be Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. I think one of the more common errors is people dispute it directly with their lender. For instance, let’s say their mortgage company doesn’t report their payments or doesn’t report their accurate balance, or reports a late payment when they weren’t late. They call repeatedly into the mortgage company disputing that, but that’s not what kicks off the Fair Credit Reporting Act. In order to instigate a formal dispute process, they must send a dispute whether sending a letter or doing it through their website – it must go through directly to the credit reporting agencies and then the credit reporting agencies have about 45 to 50 days to investigate in a consumer dispute.

And what they are required to do is reach out to the creditor, obtain accurate information or perhaps determine that the information reported is in fact accurate and they verified it and then they must send a response back to the consumers as I said within 45 to 50 days. Those results that come in directly to the consumers are probably the most important part of any dispute process because they’re going to tell you whether or not that error was corrected and if it wasn’t it’s gonna also tell you whether it was the credit reporting agency that didn’t do something properly or whether it was the original lender that didn’t do something properly. So those results are key.