Mortgage Preapproval II

I applied for a mortgage on 8/21/01. My bank pulled a tri-merged report from Credco on 8/29/01. Credco is reporting that I have three accounts from an old bank that I used to deal with that were late in 7/01 and 8/01. This of course is an error, and I carried the actual note to my bank that shows it was paid in full in 2/01, therefore it couldn't be late in 8/01....duh. She faxed a copy to Credco, and they verified the old information a few days later, and no new inquiry was pulled. My lender kept saying that she has never seen anything like this before. Well, I have never seen a lender as slow and dense as she is, but that is another story. She kept arguing with me that Credco is not a reporting agency....wrong. Anyway, all of this mess is related to my disputes of several accounts, because somehow those dispute dates are being reported as lates even though all of the accounts in question have been paid off since 2/01 or before.
My lender told me to call or write my old bank to verify the late dates that Credco is reporting. Isn't that something she should be doing? Oh well. Anyway, I am not sure if the errors are from Credco, CSC, or straight from Equifax. I will have to call and see on Monday. If it is Credco, I am going to file a complaint with the FTC who has already slapped them on the wrist before for botching imformation on these tri-merged reports. What a nightmare. I hope to get a house by Christmas.

 

Bkev, that is not correct. Look at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/1998/9810/credco.htm :



"For Release: October 28, 1998
Major Producer of Merged Credit Reports Agrees to Settle Charges of Violating Fair Credit Reporting Act;

Settlement Would Require Company to Investigate; Take Other Actions

First American Real Estate Solutions, LLC ("FARES") has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that First American CREDCO ("CREDCO"), now a division of FARES, violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act ("FCRA") by, among other things, failing to investigate information disputed by consumers in certain credit reports -- known as instant merge reports -- prepared by CREDCO. FARES is based in St. Petersburg, Florida; CREDCO is based in San Diego, California.

Instant merge reports, produced by CREDCO and other consumer reporting agencies, blend consumer account information on individual consumers from at least two, and often all three, of the national credit bureaus, Trans Union, Equifax, and Experian. The market for these reports includes residential mortgage lenders, home equity lenders, automobile dealers, residential property managers, and others. Instant merge reports are produced and delivered electronically via computer to these end-users in a matter of seconds.

Under the FCRA, when a consumer disputes information in a consumer report (such as an instant merge report), the consumer reporting agency must investigate the disputed information and correct or delete the information if it is inaccurate. If after investigation, the consumer reporting agency chooses not to change the way it reports the information, it must include in future consumer reports a statement that the information is being disputed by the consumer and, if the consumer submits a statement describing the dispute, include that statement in subsequent consumer reports. The FCRA also requires consumer reporting agencies to follow reasonable procedures to prevent inaccurate or unverifiable information from appearing on subsequent consumer reports.

According to the FTC's complaint detailing the charges, CREDCO failed to comply with any of these requirements in connection with its instant merge reports. The complaint states that CREDCO typically did not investigate disputed information in its instant merge reports. Instead, CREDCO referred consumers with complaints to the national credit bureaus from which CREDCO received the disputed information. In addition, according to the FTC's complaint, on the rare occasions when CREDCO did investigate disputed information, the company did not correct or delete from its files the information found to be inaccurate or obsolete. The complaint alleges further that, when such investigations did not resolve a consumer's dispute and the consumer submitted a dispute statement, CREDCO neither indicated in future instant merge reports that the consumer disputed the information nor included the consumer's dispute statement in subsequent reports. Finally, the complaint alleges that, when CREDCO learned through investigations that certain instant merge report information was inaccurate, it did not prevent the information from reappearing in future reports."

It sure looks like they didn't learn their lesson.