Judgments are a peculiar animal in credit reporting, as being public records, they do not always get reported by the actual party involved with the adverse information, such as the judgment creditor. The CRAs, for example, hire private businesses to review public records and provide that information to supplement their files.
As such, the normal dispute process requring the CRA for forward the dispute to the furnisher for their verification often is bypassed.
The CRAs, as the ultimate decision-maker in their "reinvestigation" of the dispute, can interject their own discretion and determination.
Thye dont, for example, formally send a copy of a judgment to the court for any official "verifcation," as the courts did not report it, and dont verify.
The CRA will usually simply do as anyone can do, and review the current records of the court. If they see it still there, they will often verify based on their informal reinvestigation.
Perhaps two of the three CRAs did a less rigorous search, but the fact that they deleted is not basis for showing that the reinvestigation by a third was inadequate.
If you want to know what they did to verify, you can send them what is commonly called a Method of Verification (MOV) request under FCRA 611(a)(6)(B), which requires them to provide a statement of the procedure they used to verify the accuracy of the disputed information.
