Stage #2 of the Credit Repair Process – Investigation

In stage #2 of the fixing your credit process is called Investigation and it relies primarily on the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). This is the most common way that people learn about when researching the credit restoration or credit repair process. Unfortunately, it comes with it’s dangers and pitfalls.

Stage 2 s called Investigation –
The Primary Law you are leveraging in this step is the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970 and the updated Fair & Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003.

This step goes right to the 3 Consumer Reporting Agencies: Experian, Equifax & TransUnion.  I will refer to these agencies as the CRA’s going forward.

The FCRA requires the CRA’s to investigate any items that you ask them to.  This is generally referred to as the dispute process.   Every negative item has to pass three tests.

1.  Is the item 100% accurate – if not it needs to be made accurate or removed
2.  Is the item 100% verifiable – if the reporting creditor cannot verify the item, it must be removed.
3.  Is the creditor able to provide this verification information within 30 days of receiving the investigation – if not the item must be removed.

Now – Caution!!!

If you dispute the wrong types of accounts, you could inspire a law suit so be careful.  More information on that is available in the Credit Dangers section of CPR’s Credit Success Pak which you can get for free on this site.  This is so important because no one wants to get sued just because they didn’t know NOT to do something.

Another caution has to do with dispute timelines.  If you dispute items on your credit file, you need to wait an entire 45 days before you send the CRA’s any additional information.  That’s because they essentially restart the time clock on all of your investigations if they receive additional information while the disputes are in process.

Patience is key here.

Items that can be disputed are late payments, collection accounts, judgments, technical errors in reporting, fraudulent accounts.  Don’t dispute anything that you know is 100% correct because it’s a violation of the law and as I’m sure you know, breaking the law is not usually a good thing.

So the last item in the dispute stage that I want to mention is to NOT use the online dispute process that the CRA’s offer from their web sites.  These have proven to be ineffective and a waste of time.  You need to send letters and you may even want to send the letters certified mail so that you have proof of their receipt and tracking of the timeline.