Dispute Question

difringe · ‎01-07-2019

Question: So the gf lived with her mother 4yrs ago; in their arrangement, gf was joint lessee. Long story short, they had to break the lease early, and they paid off the rest of the lease. They got charged with something else after departure, and it went to collections; they've been in contact with her mother about it.

The way I understand it, since she's joint, there's nothing she can do about the collection if it's valid, however it's behaving oddly. We checked her credit reports, and basically since 2015 it's reported as "FTP (Failed to Pay) almost every month, but the balance shown is $0, and the status is closed. So to get a handle on it, I've told her to get whatever information she can get from her mother w/r/t what they were being charged for, when that hit collections, when it was paid, etc., so we're waiting on that.

However, her mother did say she paid off the collection (which makes sense from what the report is saying?). If that is the case, it should be reporting as a paid collection and not "FTP," correct? So basically, once she gets the appropriate information from her mother, she should file disputes with each bureau that is reporting this and add the documentation of when it was paid off, correct? Is there anything else that I'm missing? Thanks!

RobertEG · ‎01-07-2019

FTP is not an offical reporting code/status under the CRA reporting manual. It is only an interpretation being made by the vendor of your commerical credit report.

Additionally, debt collectors dont report monthly payment history profiles to the CRAs. Any collection that remains open with a balance is delinquent, by definition. The collection does not store prior monthly status information. Its period of continuing or increased delinquency is measured by the tiime from the DOFD up to the last date that the collection reported to still be open and unpaid.

If paid, the collection should report a current status of closed, paid, $0 balance.

Yes, if it is not showing paid, closed, $0 balance, you have basis for a dispute.

However, the debt collector need only correct the inaccuracy. A dispute will not mandate deletion of the collection.

Before disputing the accuracy of what is being reported, I would make sure that the inaccuracy is one of actual reporting by the debt collector, as opposed to some showing by the vendor of your commerical credit report of a non-existent FTP payment history on a collection.

More specifically, I would obtain a detailed credit report from either annualcreditreport.com or directly from the CRA before filing a dispute, and thus determine how the debt collector is actually reporting.

difringe · ‎01-08-2019

@RobertEG wrote:

Before disputing the accuracy of what is being reported, I would make sure that the inaccuracy is one of actual reporting by the debt collector, as opposed to some showing by the vendor of your commerical credit report of a non-existent FTP payment history on a collection.
More specifically, I would obtain a detailed credit report from either annualcreditreport.com or directly from the CRA before filing a dispute, and thus determine how the debt collector is actually reporting.

Thanks for this, while she had pulled from Experian's website, for whatever reason they don't make it easy to actually get your report from the account you create? So she pulled the report from annualcreditreport.com and we saw that it's reporting as closed, but of course it's still reporting as a collections account. Main thing is for her, she's been monitoring her FAKO score through CapitalOne, which uses TransUnion, which is the only bureau not reporting that collection, so she was completely blindsided when she saw her actual Equifax/Experian scores. From the report we can see it's showing as having been paid in 2015, so it'll be off in a few years. Thanks again!