The terms "hard" and "soft" inquiry are not terms mentioned in the FCRA. The real distinction between hard and soft inquiries is based on whether or not Fair Isaac includes the inquiry in your FICO scoring.
There are a limited number of types of inquires that FICO does not include in scoring, such as the pull of your own CR, promotional pulls of your name and address, and any inquiry reported under an inquiry code that FICO ignores.
Pulls of your CR by a debt collector are not one of those excluded inquiry codes, and yes, they do count in credit scoring.
Getting an inquiry removed is usually done by contacting the party who pulled your CR and asking them to re-code it under a code that FICO does not score. The other way to get an inquiry removed is to dispute the permissible pull authority of the party who made the inquiry. Normally, permissible pulls result from credit or business transactions initiated by the consumer. If you dont feel that the inquiry was under a permissible pull, you can dispute it. However, you cannot dispute inquireis directly with the party who made the inquiry. Credit inquiries are excluded from the direct dispute process. Disputes must be made through the CRA that granted the inquiry for your CR.
Since FICO only scores inquiires for one year, by the time you go through the dispute process, there is usually not much relevant time remaining, and the impact of a single inquiry is not that great. So is it worth it?
