Here is my legal understanding of the credit inquiry process.
When anyone requests your CR, they must provide to the CRA a certification of the reason for the inquiry, and certify that the information will be used for no other purpose. FCRA 607(a). The FCRA never mentions the terms "hard" or "soft" pull. If the requeted reason meets any of the "permissible purposes" set forth in FCRA 604((a), and the requester has made a certification of this, they the requestor is provided access to our full CR. The only exception to that is if the stated reason is for making you a so-called "promotional" offer for credit that does not certify that y0ou currently have a business relationship. FCRA 604(c)(2). Those types of inquirees don get your ful CR. Just your name and sddress.
So the CRAs rely on the certifiction of a permissible purpose, which provided by self-certfication of the inquiree. If you dispute this with the CRA, the fault, if the certification was not correct or was false, is with the inquiree, not the CRA, So CRAs arent very receptive of such disputes.
As for how these inquiries are handled by FICO, they must rely on the inquiry codes reported the inquirees to make their determination of whether to treat it as a so-called "hard" of "soft" inquiry in their reporting. There are approx 12 different rinquiry codes availble for recording the reason for the inquiry. That depends on the accuracy of the inquiry code provided by the inquiree.
Take, for example, the failure of FICO scoring to only count multiple inquires for auto/mortage loas with a window as a single inquiry. The problem was most likely . because each inquiree did not properly code their inquiry with a code that FICO recognizes as having been for that purpose.
Inquiry codes, and soft and hard pull categorization, are not regulated under the FCRA, and thus are not, by themselves, a subject of dispute.
Disputing an inquiry showing in your CR would probably, in my opinion, require you to file a dispute under FCRA 611(a), challenging the accuracy of their seft-certification of the reason for the inquiry. that was provded to the CRA under FCRA 607(a). Since that basic documentation is only retained in your credit file, and is not provided in your CR, that would be most difficult to do.
The best way, in my opinion, to deal with credit inquiries is to first order your full credit report from annualcreditreport.com That is the only CR that know of that lists the reason codes for your inquires. If you see one that is incorrect, I was first contact the party who made the inquiry, and ask them to update their prior reporting with the CRAs..
Usually, by the time you go through all of that, the one-year scoring parameter used by FICO will most likely either have expired, or is close to expiring. So little or nothing is gained.
