As a borrower, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, gives you many rights that play an important role in keeping you informed about your credit. Some of these rights include:
- Right to get a free credit report every year from the three major credit bureaus.
- The Credit Bureaus are under the obligation to make that those reports are as accurate as possible.
- The right to walk into any of the credit bureaus offices and demand for a copy of your credit report.
These are just some of the few rights that we are all aware of, however, there are numerous other rights in regard to our credit history that we have got no idea on.
A few of these rights that we might be unfamiliar with are mentioned below.
According to the FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act), your history as a driver, is some sort of a consumer report. You have the right to access any report that contains a history of your driving record.
- Unless you explicitly give permission, no employer is allowed to view your credit reports. Even though this is not a requirement with transactions associated with credit, you have to give written permission before you employment credit report is viewed by others.
- In the event that you have a negative information re-inserted into your credit history, it is your right to be informed of this modification within a week of the change. This change may be communicated in a number of ways that will have been agreed upon prior to the change getting made. It could be via verbal communication or email.
- Before selling off your credit report, it is the duty of the credit bureau to ensure that the party of interest has a legal reason for wanting your credit report. This is known as permissible purpose.
- When applying for a mortgage loan, it is the duty of the lender to readily make copies of your actual scores (the ones used for underwriting) for free. This has been a prerequisite since 2003. In the event that you have since closed on your mortgage loan, you need to go through your closing paperwork, in order to get more information from the credit score disclosure document.
- If at any one time you opt to close down a credit card account, then It is the responsibility of the lender to report, that you closed down the account.
- It is the responsibility of the credit bureaus to report that you are disputing any information on your credit report, that is, if you choose to do so. While the investigation is taking place into the disputed information, the FICO score does not regard the disputed item and does not include it in their payment history and debt categories.
- If you believe that the information on your credit report is erroneous, then you have the right to dispute it for free. The credit bureaus have a time limit of 45 days to complete their investigation, however, in some cases the dispute might be cleared up in a few weeks. The credit bureaus have the obligation of informing you of the results that they came up with.
- If your credit reporting agency believes that your dispute is frivolous, they have the right to ignore it. If you choose to continue to keep on investigating the same item again and again, they will eventually put a hold on the matter.
- You have the right to a consumer statement not more than 100 words to explain the context of a particular item on your credit report. With time however, this statement has become meaningless.
- You have the right to hire an attorney to help you enforce your rights. However, this is not necessary as both the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission, share the responsibility of enforcing the FCRA.
