Many consumers are unaware that a party does not need express consumer authorization to obtain their credit report, and dispute on that basis.
The FCRA is sturctured to permit a party to pull your credit report without your express permission if the purpose is one or more of the reasons set forth under FCRA 604.
That facilitates the consideration of applications for credit and other business transactions. Otherwise, business and credit transactions would come to a crawl.
A party is required, if no express consumer authorization is obtained, to provide a statement of their permissible purpose (i.e., one or more purposes set forth in any subsection under section 604) along with their inquiry.
Once a CRA has sent a credit report, they take the postition that the "toothpaste is out of the proverbial tube," and cannot be undone.
They take the position that they cannot remove the fact that they filled an inquiry.
The fact that they have filled an inquiry thereafter becomes something that the FCRA requires them to provide a record of, and they do not consider any goodwill deletions.
The only legal basis to challenge an inquriy is to show that the inquiree did not provide a statement of permissible purpose. The CRAs will respond to challenge of an inquriy by stating it is a factual matter once the request has been filled.
The "proper" procedure for getting legitimate inquiries removed from any scoring is not to dispute or challenge the fact of the inquiry, but rather to rely on the CRA policy that permits some inquiries to be coded as so-called "soft inquiries." They include, by CRA policy, inquiries made by a consumer to view their own credit report, and regular, internal account reviews conducted by existing creditors. They also include discretionary coding of other, normally "hard" inquiries, as soft.
You can contact the inquiree and request they contact the CRA and re-code their inquiry as "soft," which does not remove it from their file, but makes it "invisible" to others and removes it from scoring.
