It is your right and responsibility to secure the accuracy of the items on your credit reports. If information registered on your credit report does not accurately represent your behavior as a consumer, then you have the right to petition that questionable information be removed from your report. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) and the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) afford you the legal right to dispute inaccurate items on your credit reports with the credit bureaus and your individual creditors.
The most common method for restoring bad credit is the credit bureau dispute. Because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you have the right to dispute and delete any items on your credit report that you feel are inaccurate, untimely, misleading, biased, incomplete or unverified.
When you dispute a questionable negative credit item with the credit bureaus, you are demanding that they execute an investigation to find whether or not the item should be listed on your credit reports. If the credit bureau cannot verify the truth of the item, then they are required to correct the listing or completely delete it from your credit report.
Another aspect of credit repair is to work with your creditors to remove the negative items from your credit reports. Your creditors have the power to delete negative items from your credit reports at any time. With more cooperative creditors, sometimes all it takes is to ask the creditor to alter or delete a negative credit listing. In situations where this non-confrontational approach is not adequate, the various consumer protection acts provide you with tools for forcing creditors and collections agencies to prove the accuracy of the reported accounts.
By using some or all of their legal rights to fair and precise credit reporting, thousands of people have legally and successfully restored their credit and increased their credit score.
