What Items On Your Credit Report
Can Be Disputed

So you have a bad credit score. Whether it is caused by irresponsible management of your finances while you were in school, fallout from a divorce, errors in credit reporting or one of many other circumstances that wreck a credit report, a bad credit score is a serious obstacle to achieving your financial goals. A bad credit score leads to high interest rates, denial of credit and even lost opportunity for employment. Because of this, cleaning up your credit reports should be seen as a first step towards reaching your financial goals.

Removing the negative listings on your credit reports that are serving to drag down your credit score, a process known as credit repair, is legal and effective. According to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), consumers have the right to dispute negative items on their credit reports in order to ensure that when their credit score is reported to potential lenders and employers, it is an accurate representation of who they are as a consumer. The FCRA allows consumers to dispute any negative item on their credit report that the consumer feels is inaccurate, misleading or unverifiable.

Disputing Inaccurate Credit Report Items

The first category of items that consumers have the right to dispute is inaccurate items. Credit reporting is not a flawless process as has been evidenced by numerous people who have had their credit reports severely tarnished through no fault of their own. It is not uncommon for people with common names to have negative items end up on their credit reports just because someone at the credit bureaus was lazy and did not make sure they were working with the credit report to the right Tom Smith.

Aside from large errors such as those caused by mistaken identity or even identity theft, smaller errors can be seen in the credit reports of millions of Americans. A recent study indicates that as many as 79% of all credit reports contain errors. Ranging from duplicate negative entries, omitted positive credit, inaccurate item details and dated information, each error in a credit report has the potential to negatively affect the overall credit score.

Because it is recognized that these inaccurate credit listings exist, the FCRA permits consumers to dispute these items. This dispute is a request to the credit bureaus to investigate the validity of a negative item. If the credit bureau cannot verify that the item should be on the report, they are required to remove it.

Disputing Negative Credit Items on The Basis of Misleading Information

Did you run into some hard times a few years ago or make some poor decisions that are still reflected on your credit reports? Are these items restricting you from purchasing a home or getting a new car even though you have been on time with all of your bills since and are an entirely different type of consumer? Then those negative items may be classified as misleading.

Your credit score is designed to provide an indicator of credit risk to potential lenders. Using this level of risk, lenders make the decision of whether or not to extend credit and how high the interest rate needs to be in order to offset the risk. If your credit score still says you are an irresponsible college student, then lenders will see you as such. Removing the old negative items from your credit report will help lenders see the responsible consumer you are today.

Disputing Unverifiable Negative Credit

When looking through your credit report, you may run across entries that you simply do not remember so you cannot say for sure if they belong there or not. Disputing these items as unverifiable is essentially saying to the credit bureaus "Prove it". If they cannot prove that the negative items should be on your credit report, either because the items are erroneous or because they are unable to contact the company that submitted the error in the first place, then they must remove them.

Now For the Hard Part

Deciding which items to dispute is the easy part of credit repair. Effectively disputing them generally proves to be more difficult. Just as you are provided with rules for which items you can dispute, the credit bureaus are provided with rules for which disputes they are required to investigate. According to the FCRA, the credit bureaus are not required to investigate disputes they feel are frivolous or irrelevant. Since the credit bureaus are for profit companies and not official government entities as many people believe, they do their best to avoid investigating disputes as they do not profit from the practice. By loosely interpreting the meaning of "frivolous or irrelevant" the credit bureaus are able to legally deny large numbers of requests for an investigation. Getting your dispute to result in an investigation becomes the most difficult part of credit repair. See the article The Myth of Easy Credit Report Repair for more information about the difficulty of disputing negative items with the credit bureaus.