Can I legally clean up my credit report?

If you have recently received a copy of your credit report and are dismayed at some of the negative information you are seeing, you may be wondering what, if anything, you can do to legally clean up your credit report. There are actually a number of things you can do to legally remove questionable negative listings from your credit reports.

This is not to say, however, that all information can be removed from your credit report. There are a lot of scams in the credit repair industry, with companies claiming to completely clean your credit. These claims are not true for everyone, as any information on your credit report that, while negative, is also accurate and true, cannot be removed, and actually must stay on your report for at least seven years. However, the good news is that anything that is questionable, which includes information that is inaccurate, untimely, misleading, incomplete, ambiguous, unverifiable, biased or unclear, can be disputed and possibly removed, cleaning up your credit report and improving your FICO score.

With persistence, time, and perseverance, you can work to legally clean your credit report on your own through numerous letters and possibly phone calls and other tactics. However, you may choose to work with an expert such as a credit correction company, who will do all the legwork for you to attempt to legally clean your credit, including working with each of the three credit bureaus to dispute each item of questionable negative information.

Once an item is put under dispute, the credit bureau attempts to verify it by contacting the credit company in question. In turn, the credit company has thirty days to prove or disprove the information. If the credit company does not respond, the information should be removed from your credit report. Be aware, though, that the credit bureau can add the information back onto your report if the credit company verifies the information even after the thirty days has passed.

A credit correction company like Lexington Law will work with the credit bureaus for you when attempting to legally clean up your credit report. With 18 years of experience and representing over ½ million clients as they’ve worked to dispute questionable credit items, Lexington Law obviously knows the proper procedures and tactics to legally clean your credit report. In fact, Lexington Law’s participating clients see an average of 84% of the damaging information removed from their credit reports within 1 year. (Individual results may vary.)