The three major credit reporting agencies, also called Consumer Reporting Agencies (CRA's) are NOT government agencies, they are for profit, multi-million dollar corporations that gather and sell your private personal information, to creditors, insurers, employers, landlords, and companies that solicit you for credit and insurance offers. They also sell your information to telemarketing and mailing list companies, without your permission and in most cases without your knowledge! They admit that errors occur on consumer reports, but they do nothing to correct them. If they really cared what they reported, they could send everyone a copy of his or her credit report once a year and ASK if everything is right! But they don't, instead they report whatever they want and make the consumer "prove" that the report is inaccurate. (I thought this was America where a person is innocent UNTIL proven guilty!)

It makes their job harder (they also make no profit from it) and it makes them look bad to their subscribers. A person with "bad credit" has 70% more inquiries on their file than a person with "good credit", think about that for a minute, every time a credit file is pulled the CRA's make money (in between three and five dollars a piece)! So do they want you to fix your credit, absolutely not! Thank God this great country is a democracy, where everyone is entitled to a fair defense. A courtroom would never stand for a prosecuting attorney to point his finger at you and yell "guilty" and then not prove his case... so why would we stand for the credit reporting agencies to do it? We at Fowler and Fowler agree with the law makers and Congress, in that the credit reporting agencies must back up what they report about you. The real issue here is not always whether the information is even accurate or not, but is the reporting agency able and willing to prove it. If your defense is properly presented, it is usually more trouble for the credit reporting agencies to verify the information on your report than it is for them to simply delete it. You can appeal to the three reporting agencies yourself, or you have the right to hire someone to do it for you.