Recently released results of a study related to Federal Trade Commission research into credit reporting fairness show that only one out of about every 100 people who try to get the information in their credit report changed actually succeed in doing so. The study, with the title “U.S. Consumer Credit Reports: Measuring Accuracy and Dispute Impacts,” was done to determine the accuracy and quality of data collected and maintained by the three major credit reporting agencies, namely Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. What researchers discovered was that less than one percent of all credit reports examined by participants prompted a dispute that resulted in a credit score adjustment and an increase of a credit score of 25 points or greater.
The conclusions are nothing new, because a similar study back in the early 1990s found the same thing. Basically what these experts find is that errors do exist in credit reports, but most of these errors are so minor in terms of their overall impact on a person’s credit profile or FICO score that they are not crucial. Fixing them, in other words, very rarely results in a direct improvement in one’s credit status.
That is seen as a good thing by FICO, who points out that these study essentially validate that the proprietary formula used by FICO works – while it also factors in the possibility of inevitable inaccuracies or errors. What that means to consumers is that if they find errors in their credit reports they should report them – but that they shouldn’t automatically expect that doing so will boost their credit rating. That only happens in less than 1% of the cases – which equals less than one person per 100.
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