The CRA has 30-days to complete its reinvestigation (unless the consumer provides additional information relevant to the dispute during the reinvestigation period, which extends the reinvestigation period to 45 days).
Those periods are absolute, and the CRA then has up to five business days after expiration of the reinvestigation period within which to send the notice of results of reinvestigation. Thus, the consumer should receive the results no later than approx 45'ish days from date of filing of the dispute (60'ish days if the reinvestigation period has been extended to 45 days).
The variance in the total time before the consumer receives the results of the dispute is primarily due to events beyond the control of the CRA. The FCRA mandates that if the information under dispute was reported to the CRA by a furnisher, the CRA is requried to forward a copy of the dispute to the furnisher, and the furnisher has up to the date of expiration of the CRA reinvestigation period within which to respond back to the CRA. The CRA must thus wait for the furnisher response before they can complete their determination and send the results to the consumer. A furnisher could respond the same day, or could delay up to the full expiration of the reinvestigation period, thus resulting in variance it total dispute resolution time.
