Room For Improvement with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)

The FCRA's failure 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 not "fair and equitable" to consumers. In defense of Congress, the Fair Credit Reporting Act has been heavily influenced by deep-pocketed industry lobbyists who are motivated to maintain the status quo. Their influence was so great that when the FCRA was originally passed 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 Fair Credit Reporting Act has been amended to become more and more consumer friendly, but there is still a ways to go and those in the credit industry are still interested in maintaining the status quo.

While the credit bureaus are no longer permitted to record personal information about you such as your ethnicity and religion, they also are not required to collect other information that is relevant to your credit worthiness. If you are a responsible consumer who has worked with the same organization for over a decade, has a perfect criminal record and makes more than enough money to cover all your expenses , it is obvious that you are more worthy of credit than a career criminal who is a burden on the system. But none of this information is recorded by the credit bureaus or used when calculating your credit score. If you and the professional criminal have the same types of accounts on your credit reports, your credit scores will be the same.

Also, while you now have the ability to see what information is contained within your credit reports, you do not have the ability to learn any more than the broad stroke concepts of how this information is used to formulate your score. What impact will paying a long overdue debt have on your credit rating? Which credit cards should be paid down first? What effect will shopping for a new loan have on your credit score? We have unclear, unproven responses 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 listings in your credit reports, but it is not always the case that this process is easy or necessarily effective. Depending on your unique situation, credit repair can be as easy as submitting an online form or as cumbersome as hunting down creditors, fighting with collections agencies, and maybe even involving legal counsel.

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

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Because the process of fixing credit reports 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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