What is commonly referred to as the Date of First Delinquency (DOFD) is legally defined under FCRA 605(c) as
"the date of the commencement of the delinquency which imme-diately preceded the collection activity, charge to profit and loss, or similar action," and applies only to charge-offs and collections.
Both published FTC opinions and prior case law have clearly established the meaning of "date of commencement of the delinquency" to be the date that the account first became delinquent, and thereafter remained delinquent up to the time of charge-off or collection.
Note that the definition of DOFD provided within the FCRA explicitly applies only to collections or reported charge-offs, and does not specfically apply to reporting of only monthly delinquencies.
Additionally, FCRA 623(a)(5) only mandates the reporting of DOFD when there is a reported CO or collection, so while an account will still have a date of commencement of delinquency when only monthly delinquencies are reported, there is no requirement under the FCRA that the creditor report a DOFD to the CRA, so it may be absent from your credit file/report.
However, the same logic that applies to use for charge-offs is also applied to determining q DOFD for a chain of delinquencies. The date of commencement of delinquency is still the DOFD.
The issue of how the DOFD is then used for credit report exlusion of a chain of monthly delinquencies when no charge-off is reported is not expclicit under the FCRA, as FCRA 605(c) only applies to COs and collections.
Montly delinquencies are a form of "other adverse items of information," and are covered under FCRA 605(c), but rather under the general, catch all exclusion provisions of FCRA 605(a)(5), which is only stated broadly to br 7 yers from the date of the adverse item.
It is thus a matter of interpretation of how or whethr DOFD also applies to exclusion of monthly delinquencies in a common chain. One of the CRAs, namely EXP, has published its interpretation of use of DOFD for a chain of monthly delinquencies as being the date of hte first delinquency in the chain,, and uses that date for exclusion of all subsequent monthly delinquencies in that same chain is 7 years from the DOFD. See the EXP web page for their discussion of that interpretation and policy. The other two CRAs dont have such a published policy, and frequently exclude each delinquency in a common chain separately at 7 years from its individual date of occurance.
