The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) Has Some Work to Do

The FCRA's inability to create a system where the "accuracy, relevancy, and proper utilization" of your information is protected has resulted in a credit reporting system that is hardly "fair and equitable" to consumers. In defense of Congress, the FCRA has been heavily influenced by industry lobbyists who are motivated to maintain the status quo. Their influence was so great that when the Fair Credit Reporting Act was made into law in the 1970's, Senator William Proxmire, one of the bill's primary sponsors, felt defeated at what had become of his original intentions for the bill.

Since it was originally passed, the FCRA has been amended to become more consumer friendly, but there is still a ways to go and those in the credit industry are still keenly interested in maintaining the status quo.

While credit reporting agencies are no longer permitted to record personal information such as your ethnicity and religion, they also are not required to collect other information that is relevant to your ability to use credit wisely. If you are a responsible consumer who has been emplyed by the same company for 10 years, has a perfect criminal record and takes home enough income to cover your expenses , it is evident that you are more worthy of credit than a career criminal who is a burden on the system. That makes sense, but none of the traits that prove you are a responsible person are recorded by the credit reporting agencies or used when calculating your credit score. If you and the career criminal have the same types of accounts recorded on your credit reports, your credit scores will be identical.

Also, while you now have the ability to see what information is recorded on your credit reports, you do not have the ability to learn any more than the very basics of how this information is used to formulate your score. What impact will paying past due debt have on your credit score? Which credit cards should be paid down first? Should you apply for a new credit card? What effect will shopping for a new loan have on your credit score? We have unclear, unproven answers for these questions, but the exact formula is known only by those who invented the model and is subject to revision at any time.

Finally, you have the right to dispute the inaccurate and misleading items in your credit reports, but you don't have the right for this process to be easy or necessarily effective. Depending on your situation, repairing your credit can be as easy as submitting an online form or as cumbersome as hunting down creditors, fighting with collections companies, and possibly involving legal counsel.

The same organizations who benefit from inaccurate credit reporting are the ones who played such a big role in watering down the FCRA and who continue to fight attempts to work towards adding equity to the credit reporting system. It is these organizations you are forced to contend with when working to enforce your right to a fair and accurate credit report.

Credit Repair Thoughts: http://www.creditrepairthoughts.org

Because the process of cleaning your credit can be a time consuming and frustrating chore, many people are turning to legitimate credit correction organizations like Lexington Law for assistance with their credit reports.

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