Your Rights with Respect to Credit Reports

• Author: Daniel A Edelman
• Profession: Lawyer
• Pages: 81-94

81

Your Rights with Respect

to Credit Reports

CHAPTER

19

If you’ve ever applied for a charge account, a personal loan, insurance, or a job, someone is probably

keeping a file on you. This file might contain information on how you pay your bills or whether you’ve

been sued, arrested, or have filed for bankruptcy.

Companies that gather and sell this information are called consumer reporting agencies or credit

bureaus. The information sold by consumer reporting agencies to creditors, employers, insurers, and other

businesses is called a consumer report. The most familiar types of consumer reports generally contain infor-

mation about where you work and live and about your bill-paying habits. Other, less well-known reports

containing information about your banking activities, relationships with landlords, medical history, crimi-

nal history, and insurance claim and litigation history that are used to evaluate you for credit or employ-

ment are also “consumer reports,” and you are entitled to the same legal protections for these reports.

Congress created a law that gives consumers specific rights in dealing with consumer reporting agen-

cies. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) (15 U.S.C. §1681 et seq.) protects you by requiring that

consumer reporting agencies furnish correct and complete information to businesses for use in evaluating

your application for credit, insurance, or a job.

Under the FCRA:

•You have the right to have your performance on credit obligations reported accurately by credit

bureaus if it is reported at all. Contrary to popular belief, there is no legal requirement that credi-

tors report to credit bureaus unless they promise you to do so in a contract.

•You have the right to be informed if information on your credit file has been used against you, to

either deny credit or insurance or increase the cost of credit or insurance. If you applied for and

were denied credit, or the cost of credit was increased, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA)

requires the creditor to tell you the specific reasons for the decision. For example, the creditor

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