Accurate Credit Reporting Relies on Consumer Action

Originally passed in almost 40 years ago, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) was created with the goal of getting consumer credit bureaus to operate in a way that is fair and equitable to individual consumers while still fulfilling the needs of lenders and others who use the information in your credit reports. The Fair Credit Reporting Act set out to accomplish this by ensuring the personal and financial information recorded in credit reports is accurate, relevant, kept confidential, and only provided to others under specific circumstances. It is the Fair Credit Reporting Act that made possible a consumer's ability to clean up bad credit.

The part of the Fair Credit Reporting Act that credit repair primarily focuses on is the accuracy of information in your credit reports. This is the one aspect where the responsibility of ensuring fair credit reporting lies with the consumer. With the other three, it is the credit bureaus that are accountable for what types of information get included in credit reports, how this information is kept secure, and which third parties have access to it. But with regards to accuracy, the Fair Credit Reporting Act does not force the credit reporting agencies to prove that information is accurate when it is first added to your credit reports. Instead, the Act gives you as a consumer the ability to dispute any questionable information in your credit reports, making it up to you to make sure the information in your credit reports is an accurate and fair representation of your credit worthiness.

Many people, including some of those who count themselves among this nation's credit experts,tend to miss this concept. They get caught up on the strict definition of inaccurate reporting and can't see the broader idea of fairness that the Fair Credit Reporting Act is really about. They persist in preching that people are only able to dispute listings that are patently inaccurate even though years of case law have amended the idea of inaccurate negative items to also include items that are untimely, misleading, incomplete, ambiguous, unverifiable, biased or unclear (collectively known as "questionable" items).

Your credit score is based on the information recorded in your credit file. If you do not feel this credit score is an accurate representation of your actual credit worthiness, it is your responsibility to work to correct this. Disputing the questionable negative items with the credit bureaus is the method made available by the Fair Credit Reporting Act for you to enforce your right to fair and accurate credit reporting.

Article Source: http://www.largedirectory.info

Lexington Law helps clients legally dispute the questionable negative listings in their credit reports as well as providing additional credit repair services extending beyond credit bureau disputes. In 2008, Lexington Law's clients saw over 600,000 negative items removed from their credit reports.

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