Just a few short years ago, a law was enacted which said that you could get a copy of your credit history report free once per year. This was a great idea, and a lot of people took advantage of this. But still, the one thing that puzzles me is why more people are not taking advantage of this law?

At the core of things, I think the reason is that very few people realize that their credit reports contain inaccurate data, or more precisely, ERRORS. For the most part, this is due to the large numbers of records that the credit bureaus need to manage for each consumer and business entity in the US. This is further complicated when a particular lender decide to start reporting to one credit bureau versus another.

I mean, think about it for just a second. If you add together all consumers and all businesses in the US, then add at least one record for each loan or credit card account they currently have or ever have had, you arrive at an incredible number which represents BILLIONS of records. That is a system administrator's nightmare but it is the job they took on. Now if only 1% of that database is in error, then that means that there are MILLIONS of records with errors, and the actual percentage shown in recent studies if more than 25% are in error!

But something that most people are not in tune with is that it is THEIR responsibility to get those errors corrected. The errors do not correct themselves, and will never get corrected if you do not initiate action to get them corrected. One of the things that compounds this problem even more is that you need to dispute that error with each of the three credit bureaus - Equifax, Trans Union, and Experian - because they do not share data between them.

Now the thing that results by having inaccurate data in your credit history profile in that your credit score is not calculated correctly. Your credit score, sometimes also known as a FICO score, is a number that the credit bureaus have come up with as a quick way to gauge your credit worthiness. Although your credit score may be higher than it should be based on these errors, chances are greater that your credit score is worse than it should be.

So how do you get the wrong information removed from your credit report? The first thing to do is get a copy of your credit report, and get a separate copy from each of the three credit bureaus. Then you start the pain-staking process of going through the report, line by line, and noting everything that is not accurate, and then you file a dispute form with that credit bureau.

After you have filed a dispute form with the credit bureau, they then have 30 days to either verify the information as being accurate, or deleting it from your credit report. The thing that makes that decision is whether or not the lender verifies the information as being accurate, or just plain does not respond. If this is an account that has been paid off for several years, even though you had some problems with the account early on, the lender may just not take the time to respond at all, in which case the data needs to be deleted.

If there are things that are REALLY wrong in your credit report instead of just information that, while detrimental to you, is still basically true, that still will reflect badly on you for your credit score. The good news is that the procedure to file a dispute with the credit bureaus is exactly the same.

After all of this, you should have a credit report that reads the way you want it to read, and that will result in your credit score being as high as it can be.