Whether to pursue more CRA disputes?!

[sunny16]

First, I've been reading and learning so much from everyone over the last 9 months.  Thank you all.

As a quick background, I had perfect credit until some business problems in 2009-2010, and have been trying to rebuild my credit since then.  I had several business credit cards that I had personally guaranteed that went delinquent, but I was able to settle and close all of those accounts by the end of 2010.  But of course those delinquencies are still doing major damage to my score.  Some of those accounts are reporting an incorrect "Current Status" as "Bad Debt/Collection", so I decided to send a dispute to Equifax on one of them to see what happened.  Good news, is that they corrected the account to "Pays as Agreed."  The bad news is that I got a credit alert that same day that dropped my score 18 pts from 666 to 648.  There have been other changes or negatives that possibly could have triggered that.  Here is what the notice said:

Account opened: 8/2005

Description: Account closed at consumer s request
Settlement accepted on this account
Business account-personal guarantee

	Previously reported	Newly reported
Balance:	$0
Past due:	$0	$0
Status:	Bad Debt; Placed for collection;	Pays account as agreed
Last activity:	10/1/2009	10/1/2009
Description:	Consumer disputes - reinvestigation in process Amount in H/C column is credit limit	Account closed at consumer s request Settlement accepted on this account Business account-personal guarantee

Why would this trigger a lower credit score.  I thought it was good news.  Should I pursue disputes on the other accounts that have similar bad info, or just leave well enough alone???

[guiness56]

Have the disputes been resolved?  When you dispute OC accounts, certain aspects of those accounts are removed from scoring.  It could lower your score.  When the dispute is completed your score will go back pre-dispute or lower or go higher depending on the outcome of the dispute.

[sunny16]

I think that this was the only account that was showing a dispute pending.  So iI think what you are saying is that on this particular account, it went from being a neutral or unknown because it was disputed, to now showing up as negative, perhaps triggering the drop in the score?  That does make sense, I guess.

The other accounts with the incorrect status are not shown as being in dispute. Theoretically, on those, would it help to have the "bad debt/collection" status changed to settled or paid as agreed?

[guiness56]

It won't help your score to have them changed.