Removing Auth user from report in prep for a mortgage loan

[khw]

Hey everyone!

I have a question I hope I can get help with, I've tried searching but come up with conflicting answers. Two years ago I added my husband to a citi card I applied for with a $9500 cli  and 0% apr, we consolidated our other CC balances and it was close to the limit at around $8500, I realized this was a bad idea for his ulti and I had him removed from the card last December because we knew we would be buying with only him on the loan this year (I am in my last year of nursing school with no current income) Anyway this afternoon we checked his credit reports and the card is still showing on transunion only, but the last time it reported was December and that showed a $8000 balance and a $121 payment, I have since paid it down to $5000. I don't know if they are counting this into his utilization, but transunion is his lowest score by about 40 points with everything else the same so I'm guessing it is. Anyway he did an online dispute as "not my account" to see if they would remove it and I rememebered after he did it that I don't think you can close a mortgage loan until all disputes are off the reports, so I think we just made a huge mistake! We are going to talk to our mortgage officer next week but we wont actually apply until our current house sells so it could be weeks to 6 months or more before we need to apply. 

If they remove the account will the fact we had a dispute be removed from the report too? Is there anything else I can do at this point? Also does anyone have any idea how long it will take to hear back from TU? I didn't see anything on the site but I thought they had a limited amount of time to investigate.

Thanks so much for any advice!

[RobertEG]

If what he filed was actually a dispute, the CRA has 30 days from date of the dispute to conclude their reinvestigation, and 5 business days thereafter to mail their Notice of Results of Reinvestigation.  That notice is formal conclusion of the dispute.  So it cannot linger.

They should, upon conclusion of the dispute, automatically as an administrative matter, remove the pending dispute flag, and update to dispute concluded.

Ergo, no pending dispute.  However, the CRAs are notorious for not completing that housekeeping promptly upon termination of a dispute.

Check his CR after receiving the Notice of Results of Reninvestigation, and contact the CRA informally if the dispute flag is not removed.

Dont formally dispute the failure to remove, as that will result in another dispute flag.  The matter then becomes one of complaint for not timely maintianing the acuracy of his credit file.

If the CRA does not promplty remove the pending dispute flag, shoot off a formal complaint to the FTC, with a cc: to the CRA.

That will get their attention.

AS for removal of the AU status, probably a good idea.  Whenever a credit report includes the account of another, the resulting scoring wont represent that of only the credit history of the individual consumer.  Thus, the creditor may wish to see a score that does not have the affect of credit history of another skewing its value either positively or negatively.  The creditor has no way to "back out" the effects of an AU account and create a score representative only of his credit history.

[Shokk]

The dispute is a good method to have this removed and I doubt it will take the full 30 days.  I was an AU on an account that was derog.  Disputed as not mine and received a letter from the OC stating it would be removed as it was not my account.  I wan to say it was gone in less than 30 days.

[khw]

Thanks for the help, this makes me feel a little bit better. 30 days or so should be more then fine. What we did was went to transunions dispute page directly from the myfico reports, we then choose the "open an investigation" link on that CC account and he chose the "not mine" checkbox. 

Hopefully they will remove it timely and without a fight, but we'll see!

Thanks again!

[Focker69]

The account will absolutely be removed from his report and it will happen inside of a few days. There will be no dispute remarks anywhere as the account in question will no longer be reporting. You'll be good to go and his score will definitely increase.

[khw]

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@Focker69 wrote:

The account will absolutely be removed from his report and it will happen inside of a few days. There will be no dispute remarks anywhere as the account in question will no longer be reporting. You'll be good to go and his score will definitely increase.

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Thats great, we are hoping for a score increase, his other scores are in the mid 700's and then this one is stuck at 699. Even if he was still on this account the balance hasn't updated since December and its showing 3k more then it really is, so its a double problem!