About Your Credit Report: Your Rights as a Consumer

Before you register to receive paid credit monitoring services you should make sure paying for services you could get for free. After all, you are eligible for up to one free credit report a year.

Furthermore, you are entitled to receive this in the U.S. from each of the three credit bureaus Experian, Transunion, and Equifax. The standards may be different in other countries but this is what it is in the U.S.

If there is any reason you believe that your rights are being violated while seeking your free credit report, you can do something about it. For instance, you can read through Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act of 2003 (FACTA) text.

It will explain all the rights you have as a U.S. consumer regarding personal records kept on you. You can also read additional rights as presented in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

In the mean time, some of your basic rights and obligations are clearly explained below:

• You not only have the right to receive a free copy of your credit report once a year but you also have a right to place alerts on your file.

• You also have the right to not have your full account numbers printed on receipts, and you also have the right not to have expiration numbers printed either.

• A consumer has the right to have any information that appears on a credit report that is proven to be a result of unauthorized transaction blocked.

• You have the right to dispute errors that show up on your credit report. This is often done best in writing.

• Consumers have the right to be notified when any “adverse action” is being taken on the basis of using a credit report. This applies to background checks as well as credit checks for employment as well as for insurance and financing applications.

Statistics

A shocking 79% of credit reports in 2004 were said to have errors on them. Variations of these statistics were given over the years. This number does not indicate, however, that any one specific portion of a person’s files was affected.

At any rate, it was later reported in 2007 that less that 2% of 52 million credit reports had errors deleted. However, this does not fully indicate the correct number of errors and probably does not account for all of them-just deleted ones.