Aside from the obvious obligation....
1. Credit report exclusion is not absolute. FCRA 605(b) exempts all of the credit report exclusion provisions of section 605(a) when a creditor requests your CR with respect to a request for credit or insurance with a principal amount of $150K or more, or for a potential employer who requests your CR for purposes of employment for a job having an annual salary of $75K or more. Granted, chances are slim that credtiors will avail themselves of those special exclusions, but the fact remains that they can. CR exclusion does not require the CRA to delete the information from their files...only to exlude it from CRs they normally issue.
2. CR exclusion may remove the easy viewing of bad debt, but does not remove the fact of its continued existence. If, for example, you app for a mortgage and the lendor asks you to list any unpaid delinquent debt, are you going to omit it simply because it is no longer appearing on your normal CR?
3. CR exclusion only prevents the CRA from including it in your CR. It does not require creditors to exclude the information from their records. Who knows if you will ever need that creditor again? A charge-off is, in my opinion, is one of the most egregious of derogs, as it carries with it not only the existence of unpaid bad debt, but the creditor's legal holding that it became so bad that it was considered to be "uncollectible."
