Credit Repair Blog

Court To Credit Bureaus: Clean Up Your Act!

A Federal District Court in California recently ordered the three major credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) to clean up the credit histories of millions of Americans who have filed for bankruptcy.  It turns out that the three bureaus were not removing old debts (which were discharged in bankruptcy) from many consumer’s credit histories.  As readers of this Website know, old debts (which are typically reported as unpaid or in collections) ruin your credit score. 

As our readers know, it is critical to have a good credit score in this difficult economy.  The California court’s ruling should clean up the credit records (and boost the scores) of millions of Americans.  Folks with “zombie debt” (old loans they paid off years ago that pop up when an aggressive debt collector pursues payment) should also get some help if those debts were discharged in bankruptcy.

The judge for the case, David O. Carter of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, gave the credit bureaus until Oct. 1 to change their systems to correct this problem.  The Court ordered the credit bureaus (among other things), to perform a “retroactive scrub” of all their files to find each “pre-bankruptcy judgment, tradeline or Collection Account” and to ensure that any discharged debts are properly updated (or removed) from all affected credit reports.

The case is titled White v. Experian et al.   Read the opinion below. 

And, if you have filed bankruptcy in the past, please make sure to check your credit report to see if the credit bureaus properly scrubbed YOUR credit history.