Credit Report - that speak all about your integrity

When you apply for a charge account, a personal loan, insurance, or a job, there's a file prepared and kept about you. This file contains information about your whereabouts. It will have the details on where you work and live, how you pay your bills, and whether you've been sued, arrested, or filed for bankruptcy. This report is called credit report.

A Company that gathers and sell credit report is called Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA). The most common type of CRA is the credit bureau. The information CRA sell about you to creditors, employers, insurers, and other businesses is called a consumer or credit report.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, is designed to promote accuracy and ensure the privacy of the information used in credit report. Recent amendments to the Act expand your rights and place additional requirements on CRAs. Businesses that supply information about you to CRAs and those that use credit reports also have new responsibilities under the law.

If you ask for your credit report, the CRA must tell you everything in your report, including medical information, and in most cases, the sources of the information. The CRA also must give you a list of everyone who has requested your report within the past year - two years for employment related requests.

Under the new law, both the CRA and the information provider have responsibilities for correcting inaccurate or incomplete information in your credit report. To protect all your rights under this law, contact both the CRA and the information provider. First, tell the CRA in writing what information in your credit report you believe is inaccurate. CRAs must reinvestigate the items in question - usually within 30 days - unless they consider your dispute frivolous. They also must forward all relevant data you provide about the dispute to the information provider. After the information provider receives notice of a dispute from the CRA, it must investigate, review all relevant information provided by the CRA, and report the results to the CRA. If the information provider finds the disputed information to be inaccurate, it must notify all nationwide CRAs so that they can correct this information in your file.

The very moment you complete the process of reinvestigation, the CRA must give you the written results and a free original copy of your own credit report. In the process if there arises some changes it is recorded in the very report. But a point should be taken note of that the changes or removal made in the items cannot be simply placed back in to the file. These changes should be thoroughly informed to the very client and the CRA should be changed accordingly. At the same time disputed information should verify its accuracy and completeness. The CRA gives the client written notice that includes the name, address and phone number of the provider.