Credit Report Corrections

A couple of months ago, I requested our annual free copy of my wife's credit report from Equifax. There was nothing seriously wrong with it, but there were several old accounts that I wanted removed. I filled out the correction forms and sent them back. By law, Equifax has to respond within 30 days. A couple weeks after I sent in the corrections, I got a letter back from Equifax saying the three accounts they listed were verified to be correct and no changes were made to the credit report. The problem was, the three accounts they listed did not belong to my wife! In fact, they did not even show up on her credit report at all!

Someone obviously made a mistake. I decided not to do anything. First of all, dealing with credit agencies is a major pain in the rear. Practically everything has to be in writing and they most likely would want to talk to my wife instead of me, since it was her credit report I was talking about. Second, their letter said nothing in her credit report was changed. Given that, I figured we were pretty safe. I didn't want to open a can of worms over this and since the errors I was trying to correct in her report were very minor to begin with, I decided to just let this one go.

So yesterday I received another letter from Equifax, this time giving me the results of their investigations. They correctly identified the accounts I had requested corrections for and they did in fact remove four accounts from her report and two others they marked as closed. (One of the things I complained about was accounts that were closed were showing as open, but with a zero balance.) They also included a new copy of her credit report and all looks good. Those three accounts they said were hers in their previous letter were not listed. Although their response took longer than the 30 day limit set by law, I'm just happy they got everything sorted out.