Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Instructs Credit Reporting Agencies To Remove Bald-Faced Lies From Consumers’ Credit Reports

Did you hear the one about the guy who continued paying his bills on time even after he was dead?  Did you hear about the lady who applied for her first car loan before she was old enough to get a learner’s permit, or the one who opened a credit card account several years before she was born?  Clearly, these are tall tales, but the credit reporting agencies expect you to believe them, or at least not to notice how implausible they are.  Unfortunately, when lenders review a loan applicant’s credit report, they only look at numbers instead of looking at the story those numbers tell.  Therefore, many consumers have had their applications for housing and employment rejected or been made to pay unfairly high prices for financial products, simply because of obvious errors on their credit reports.  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has announced its intention to address this problem, but removing the errors from credit reports will only go so far to improve the financial circumstances of the consumers harmed by inaccurate credit reporting.  If you are suffering from the effects of having a low credit score, contact a Philadelphia debt collection abuse lawyer.

CFPB Promises to Take Action Against Junk Data

The CFPB recently issued an advisory opinion referring to inaccurate items on consumers’ credit reports as “junk data.”  It instructed the credit reporting agencies to be more diligent in reviewing consumers’ credit reports for accuracy and to take the initiative to correct errors before sending the reports to prospective lenders.  The CFPB has received many complaints for consumers who discovered inaccurate data on their credit reports only when the consumers requested copies of their credit reports, after the credit reporting agencies had reported unfairly low credit scores to prospective lenders.  According to the CFPB, ensuring that the information on consumers’ credit reports is correct is the responsibility of credit reporting agencies, not of consumers.

What to Do If Credit Reporting Errors Are Harming Your Creditworthiness

Credit repair companies will carefully review your credit reports to find inaccuracies and contact the credit bureaus to correct them, but this is also something you can do on your own; in fact, the credit score boost you get from fixing inaccuracies on your credit report is big enough to warrant fixing the errors but not big enough to warrant paying someone else to do it for you.  Correcting errors on your credit report will not move you into a new tax bracket overnight; you will need to address your debt problems at a deeper level.  A consumer law attorney can help you choose the best solution, such as debt settlement, bankruptcy filings, or debt consolidation.

Contact Louis S. Schwartz About Improving Your Credit Score

A Philadelphia consumer law attorney can help you improve your credit score by correcting errors on your credit report and settling or paying down your outstanding debts.  Contact Louis S. Schwartz at CONSUMERLAWPA.com to set up a free, confidential consultation.

Source:

americanbanker.com/news/cfpb-signals-imminent-crackdown-on-junk-data-in-credit-reports