What is the Fair Credit Reporting Act?

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) is a federal law that helps to ensure the accuracy, fairness and privacy of the information in consumer credit files. The Fair Credit Reporting Act regulates the way credit reporting agencies can collect, access, use and share the data they collect in your consumer report.

Credit Reporting Agencies such as Experian, Transunion, Equifax, LexisNexus, and others are all subject to this act.

Identifying an issue in your credit report is the first step you need to take to discover a violation. If you find an error in your credit report that was no fault of your own, you then need to dispute the error and allow the credit reporting agency time to remove it.

If the Credit Reporting agency refuses to remove the error and reports back that the error was not a mistake, you may have a case.

Examples of Violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

• Your Consumer Credit Report contains accounts and information that doesn’t belong to you or belongs to a relative or friend with a same or similar name.
• Late payments recorded when the payments were received on time.
• Addresses, phone numbers and names or other identifying information that doesn’t belong to you published in your report.