Having practiced in credit reporting cases for seven years now, I am seeing more and more recurring credit report problems for clients who have previously successfully sued credit bureaus or financial institutions. I was surprised to see the same problems coming back over and over again, but they are.
Even after you have successfully cleaned inaccurate information off of your credit report, you need to check every three to six months to see if it reappears. The reason: if the financial institution changes one single bit of information in the reporting of your account, it will bypass the “suppress” function that the credit bureaus have put on the account to prevent its future appearance on your credit report.
Let me explain: say you have “Barney Bank” (made-up bank name) account number 12345 on your credit report, which is inaccurate because it does not belong to you. You bring a lawsuit under the FCRA because you have not been successful disputing this information yourself. You successfully settle the lawsuit, which includes money in your pocket for damages, your attorney’s fees paid and the inaccurate information removed from your credit report.
The credit bureaus will put a “suppress” function on account no. 12345. However, this suppress function will only suppress (prevent from appearing on your credit report) account number 12345. It will not suppress the account if the account number or reporting information is changed, even slightly.
So, what happens at Barney Bank? Barney Bank will transfer the loan to one of its branches, or one of its divisions for “charged off loans”, or will accidentally sell the loan to a debt collector as part of a portfolio of loans, or will reclassify the loan in its own computers, or whatever. in other words, Barney Bank will do something that is completely “barney”. (This term is borrowed from my kids, who in turn borrowed it from the TV show featuring the large purple dinosaur. In this usage, “Barney” refers to something stupid and nonsensical.)
Once Barney Bank reclassifies the loan, or sells it, or transfers it, etc., viola! Barney Bank changes the account number! Once they change the account number, the account gets reported to the credit bureaus, but since the account number is changed, the account now bypasses the “suppress” function which the credit bureaus had previously placed on the account. It now reappears on your credit report.
So, even after you have cleaned up your credit report, you need to follow up to catch any re-reporting.
Interesting article, thanks for posting