How to Deal with the Credit Bureaus to Correct a Mistake
Every piece of financial advice you ever get to hear tells you one thing - that you need to be all over your credit score. You need to get your credit reports from the three credit bureaus for free three times a year, and you need to do everything in your power to make sure your credit score is as incandescent as it could possibly be. Now I've always followed this kind of advice, and I've had great credit; and I've seen it at first hand how wonderful it is to be trusted for a new credit card or car loan. But one day all of a sudden, in one of my credit reports showed up a little problem about a $25 utility bill that it said I hadn't paid about 7 years ago. I was pretty sure they've had it all wrong, and I felt that all I needed to do was to call the credit bureau and alert them over the mistake they made, and all would be well again.
As with most things in life, it wasn't really that simple. They have billions of transactions to deal with, the credit bureaus do; when you call about something, they are not going to send someone over to make sure that what the merchant or utility charges were correct. They're just going to call them on the phone; and if they claim that the charge is correct, they will drop your complaint right there. When it comes to proving that you've been dealt a bad turn, you really are presumed guilty until you prove you are innocent. I thought it would be pretty easy to prove this; I have proof that I hadn't even lived at that address at the time. I set up an online dispute with Experian; the law states that the credit bureaus need to respond to any problem within six weeks; I waited long past that, with no reply. And then all of a sudden, I got an e-mail - they said they had verified it, and they saw that I did in fact default on my bill (a bill for utility services is used after I had moved out).
When I called the utility, they told me that they had never received my request to turn off my service. But they noticed that the new people who had moved into the apartment were paying all the bills that showed up in my name. I wondered what would happen if I could just pay off the $25 and let it go; I learned that that would mean that I was accepting guilt in not having paid the debt in all these years. It would permanently go on my record. I patiently called Equifax, and patiently sat through their phone tree for what seemed like hours, before I finally got hold of a manager who had the power to help me. And he did. I ordered another Equifax report and found out that my score had jumped up 60 points once that charge was removed.
To deal with Experian, I obtained a copy of the lease that I had held all those years ago, that showed that I had never lived at that address at the time the charged delinquency occurred. At the time, I got a call from the utility company; they said that if I would pay my $25 bill, they would call Experian, and have the charge removed. So I paid and found out that Experian still wasn't removing it a month later. I called them and gave them a piece of my mind. Apparently, when you deal with the credit bureaus, you need to first go to the source of the problem - the service that claims that you didn't pay a bill. It's possible often that you can work something out with them like I did. Dealing with the credit bureaus is such a nightmare.