Know About Your Rights Concerning Credit Reports

Since your credit report is basically a fact sheet of your financial credibility, you should be able to enjoy certain rights concerning the disclosure of its contents. Well, do you? Yes, and unfortunately, no. Although some interested entities still need your authorization in order to view its contents (and the report comes out in different versions too, depending on the inquirer), some companies still slip through the cracks and manage to catch some windfall; think of this the next time some anonymous caller offers you hotel reservations on some Caribbean island.

Fortunately, the law requires the consumer reporting agencies, those which have your financial information at their mercy, to observe certain rules regarding the collection and maintenance of information. This is clearly stated in detail in the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1971. For instance, only those institutions with permissible reasons can be granted a copy of your report; this basically means that only those whom you have done business with have access to your credit report, such as an employer, a lender, or a credit card company. This may be provided only with your written consent.

Of course, you have the right to a full detailed access of your own credit report; it should also include an extensive list of everyone who has gained access to it, whether you authorized them to do so or not. The law specifies a maximum fee of ten dollars for the copy, but you are otherwise entitled to one credit report copy every twelve months, at no cost to you. This privilege is particularly applicable if you are unemployed or receiving welfare support, if you’ve been a victim of fraud, or if your credit has been denied because of details in your credit report. In the last circumstance, the entity who denied you should also be able to show valid reasons for such, and it must provide you with contact information of the bureau which supplied the data.

In case you find any detail errors in your report, you have all the right to dispute it, and the credit reporting agency (CRA) answerable to it should investigate the matter within thirty days. They are prohibited from including the disputed detail on the report until it is proven correct, or not without an accompanying written statement of the dispute. If in case the data is proven to be indeed inaccurate, it should be permanently removed within thirty days, and the credit reporting agency is required to inform all of the other national CRAs of the error.

Take note that your credit report reflects the best and worst of your financial information, and negative details will stay on it for seven years. Bankruptcy details stay for ten years, so keep yourself afloat. If the telemarketers are becoming too much of a nuisance, you can always request the CRAs to remove your name from the lists which they sell to profit-oriented institutions; if they still manage to gain access to your credit report without an authorized and reasonable purpose, thereby violating one of the crucial provisions of the FCRA, you can give them their just desserts by suing for damages.