Serious Delinquency triggered by Payment Arrangement Code

[Anonymous]

My fico score dropped from 725 to 640.  I contacted fico and was told it caused by the "Paying under partial payment arrangement" clause on one of the account. On the report it also said the account is in serious delinquency and past due.  I was supprised by this. I then contacted the creditor and TransUnion. They told me the account is never late and in good standing. Just a history on this account, 6 month ago I was offered a reduce interest from 29% to 9% from my credit card but they have to close the account. I was not told that they will report the account "Paying under partial payment arrangement".  One of the rep from fico advise me to contact the credit to request them to change the reporting "code".  Here are the questions I have:

1. Why the fico reported the account as in serious delinquency and past due but in fact i never have any late payment and current?

2. How do I go about to have the delinquency and past due removed from the fico report. All three report shown I have no late?

3. How do I file a dispute with FICO. FICO told me to file a dispute with the 3 reporting agency. The reporting agency  told me there is no errors.

I just want to remove the "delinquency" and "past due" from the FICO. Because the account is not delinquen or past due.

Im so depressed now. Many thanks in advance for your advice.

[llecs]

What I recommend, since you just purchased a TU FICO report, go to annualcreditreport.com and order a new report from TU. Even if a TU rep tells you over the phone about the status, they are often wrong and they certainly don't know about FICO scoring since their website doesn't offer FICO scores. The report pulled from ACR (or you can go directly to transunion.com) shows the entire 7-year history as opposed to a 2-year history by myFICO or any other 3rd-party service out there (e.g. TrueCredit, Creditchecktotal, or whatever).

1) Whenever you enter into a partial payment like a loan modification, a CC modification, or even a payment deferment for something like an auto loan, you'll likely get hit with lates every single month while on the plan, even if you pay 100% on time. That's what happened here. The creditor added the comment and/or added late payments because of being on the plan. The premise behind it is that you are paying less than the original amount of the org. contract agreement and therefore lates can be reported. It's certainly not fair. Many took advantage of loan mods or HAMP (for distressed mortgages) only to get slammed with bad credit or even eventually foreclosure.

2) When you pull your report from TU, you'll likely see that comment they said wouldn't appear and possibly even lates. You can ask your credit card company via a goodwill letter and phone calls to remove any reporting comments (e.g. paid for  less than full, paid under a payment agreement, election of remedy, etc). It is the CCC that reports these comments not FICO. You'd need to deal with them. Also ask to remove any lates if lates are reporting (and they often do under a payment plan like this). Once the CCC updates with the CRAs, then FICO scores based on what the CRAs report and if they report favorably again, then your score would increase.

3) You wouldn't file a dispute with FICO because FICO only reports what is reported by the CRAs. You can file a dispute with TU, but I wouldn't. Start with the goodwill letter mentioned above to the CCC.

Finally, not mentioned, consider that maybe the score drop was due to other factors like increased utilization, decreased CL on that account you have the agreement with, or some other factor that could have caused a drop (e.g. added accounts, dropped accounts, change in statuses in other accounts, added baddies, changing CLs or balances on your other accounts, and so on).

Keep us posted.