Each year, many consumers find out that they’re not going to be able to reach their financial goals of owning a car or home or taking out a loan because their credit score isn’t what it needs to be to make this happen. One elderly Florida man recently learned this lesson all too well. He found out that his credit report contained adverse information about someone else when he attempted to take out a $125,000 loan to care for his dying wife. His daughter is now suing the credit bureaus Experian and Equifax on his behalf for this.
The situation that the Florida man found himself in is, unfortunately, not all that uncommon. Each of the three leading credit bureaus has ended up settling with 30 different states’ attorney generals in the past few years. TransUnion, Experian and Equifax all agreed to devise strategies for making sure that individuals who are indeed alive aren’t listed as dead on their credit reports. They also agreed to disclose when they identified any mixed files.
Research conducted by the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) earlier this year revealed that the country’s three major credit bureaus exercise poor discretion when putting information on debtors’ credit reports. The NCLC researchers described the criteria for doing so as an “overly loose matching” one.
There were nearly 330,000 complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CRPB) last year alone. At least 25% of them had to do with the country’s three leading credit bureaus. Some 83% of the claims described how these agencies had placed incorrect information on their credit reports. Even still, some financial analysts point out that only 2% of files contain inaccurate information. The CFPB argues that as many as 2 million Americans have been affected by this.
While many consumers can contact the credit bureaus to get adverse information removed from their credit reports, it’s a much more involved process for others. If you’ve identified inaccurate information on your credit report that is keeping you from achieving the financial goals that you’d set for yourself, then an attorney in Vadnais Heights can advise you of the legal remedies that you may be able to pursue under Minnesota law in your case.
