TransUnion Score Low Erroneous Late Payment Reporting?

[mortimerwereback]

Good evening, myFICO'ers,

I had a question that's been bugging me for a while now and I figured why not ask. Perhaps I'm missing something. Would appreciate any insights from our many experts. Long story short, my Chapter 7 was discharged 01/2021. Rebuild has been going well, I already have many prime cards, Navy Fed, Apple Card, Venture, etc. FICO 9s and Bankcard 9s have been kind to me as most are 700+. Discharge cleaned everything out, credit reports look good. Annualcreditreport.com credit reports looked clean as well.

Regarding my FICO 8 score. Just as the title states, it's always been the lowest of my three:

Equifax 681

TransUnion 653

Experian 679

It's the only FICO in orange, not yellow for "Good" in terms of scoring. Now I get all the scores are different, but the one thing about TU that's different from EQ and EX is that it says I had a late payment: 1 year 2 months ago, which would put me at about July 2021. This is seven months past my discharge date? Now as far  as I can see, my bk is clean. Everything was discharged. No collections. It's about as tidy as I could hope for. EXCEPT.... TU is reporing this "late payment date" as 1 year 2 months ago.

Equifax and Experian do not ding me for this and are reporting the same date of 2 year and 5 months as "Time since most recent last payment." Which is around April 2020? Kinda makes sense, but at least this aligns with before my bk was discharged.

Should I perhaps, pay for a credit report from Transunion.com and then try a dispute? The only thing that correlates to "1 year 2 months" ago is upon examing my "annualcreditreport.com" credit report, I see that there is a field called "date updated" that has two AMEX and my Camry that updated in July 2021. But then that's one of 15 fields such as: date opened, date closed, status, etc.

I'm skeptical it's because of "date updated" because if so, why not my Penfed that updated 08/2022? or Cap One that updated 02/2021 on the same report.

What gives? Thank you for reading and your time!

Edit: I was thinking.. perhaps this is something to do with the TU FICO 8 scoring model. I don't see anything on the reports to correlate with the late payment asides from what I typed above. Perhaps it's crunching my data and simply flagging it different. And if so, it's not like I can dipute it because if I pull my report from TU it'll look like annualcreditreport. It'll just have fields and dates for different account metrics. Whereas FICO 8 aggregates the info.

[FireMedic1]

No negative info can be placed on a credit file after the file date. Since it happened 7+ months after DC. More since filing occurred. You can dispute it as a negative entry after filing. Send in proof of your filing date papers. Explain entry was past the file date. That should take care of it. Even though it was updated late. Was it updated with the old date of the late payment?

[mortimerwereback]

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@FireMedic1 wrote:

No negative info can be placed on a credit file after the file date. Since it happened 7+ months after DC. More since filing occurred. You can dispute it as a negative entry after filing. Send in proof of your filing date papers. Explain entry was past the file date. That should take care of it. Even though it was updated late. Was it updated with the old date of the late payment?

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Thank you for your reply Firemedic1!! And the information, that's good to know. Appreciate your depth of knowledge.

The no "new" negative info can be placed on my report after discharge, is where I'm confused. Carefully examining my myFICO TU report, it shows me a list of closed bk'd account, and under those the only fields with dates are "open date" and "last activity" under the MORE DETAILS drop down. There is not a single account that was bk'd that shows "last activity" after my Ch. 7 discharge in January 2021.

I also looked at 2-YEAR PAYMENT HISTORY dropdown, for all bk'd account. None showing an update past Ch. 7 discharge of January 2021.

And so my FICO TU should not be pulling this mystery date. Then I was thinking perhaps this is one of the vague "and/or" statements where FICO describes something using "and/or" such as, "You recently missed a payment or had a derogatory indicator...." But that couldn't be it as it gives me a specific date: Your most recent missed payment happened 1 YR 2 Mo.

The only time I see dates the "could-kind of" correspond with what myFICO says is this mystery late, 1 year 2 months ago, is on my Annualcreditreport.com report, as I'd mentioned in my original post. But I really don't think that's it as it's not myFICO and those dates don't show up on my TU FICO.

So were I to pull my TU report, there'd be nothing to "report." Same with myFICO as no "late" dates show there as well? That's the frustrating part... not being able to dispute this mystery date.

Really odd... and damaging, if it's pulling the TU 8 score lower.

[FireMedic1]

Next question. Where you seeing this? Vantage site?

Pull your free annual credit report for TU and look on their and see if its even listed as such.

[mortimerwereback]

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@FireMedic1 wrote:

Next question. Where you seeing this? Vantage site?

Pull your free annual credit report for TU and look on their and see if its even listed as such.

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Only seeing it on myFICO. Already pulled TU annualcreditreport.com and some dates correlate (dates & accts in original post) in the field called "date updated." There were three accounts that could fall into this 1 yr 2 mo, but again I don't know what "date updated" actually references. Also, there were even more recent "date updated" dates that updated and those are not showing as late.

myFICO will not show the same dates (vs annualcreditreport) as myFICO uses "last activity." And no "last activity" dates on myFICO match the 1 yr 2 mo? Which...I would think it would have to show on myFICO for myFICO to flag exactly 1 yr 2 mo.

Perhaps it's some algorithm glitch? I mean it is software after all and I've read other posts on myFICO talking about software hiccups.

[mortimerwereback]

So.... I did some digging after @FireMedic1s advice:

No negative info can be placed on a credit file after the file date. Since it happened 7+ months after DC. More since filing occurred. You can dispute it as a negative entry after filing. Send in proof of your filing date papers. Explain entry was past the file date. That should take care of it. Even though it was updated late. Was it updated with the old date of the late payment?

And after some careful scrubbing of my TransUnion report (and to my surprise) I did find an error. I ended up submitting a dispute through the TransUnion website and uploaded my discharge papers as proof. Website said I should receive a "mailed" response within 30 days.

Reason I thought something was off:

Both Equifax and Experian (on myFICO) show: Time Since Most Recent Late Payment as:  2 YR 5 MO. This is correct as I actually counted backwards and ended up on my Chapter 13 filing date of April 2020. I don't know why this surprised me, but I liked that it hit right on the dot. 2 years 5 months prior to Sept 2022 is April 2020 (fyi, my Ch 13 was converted to a Ch 7 on Jan 2021).

However.....

Transuion shows: Time Since Most Recent Late Payment as 1 YR 2 MO. The key to finding the error was using my annualcreditreport.com report. On myFICO there are two dates that show for my last vehicle, "Last Activity" and "Last Updated." Whereas on annualcreditreport.com the headings used are "Date Updated" and "Last Payment Made." Intially, I didn't catch the error on myFICO because I didn't think anything odd about Last Activity or Last Updated.

What caught my attention was, annualcreditport.com shows "Last Payment Made" as 06/29/2021 and "Date Updated" as 07/30/2021. I made no such payment. Now lets count backwards. 1 YR 2 MO prior to Sept 2022 is July 2021. I believe TU is seeing this mystery payment on 06/29/2021 and then updating on 07/30/2021 as late. 1 YR 2 MO prior to this month, Sept 2022, is July 2021. All the dates seem to line up.

I'll update this thread when I receive a decision from TU, I'm really hoping that my FICO 8 scores will catch up with EQ and EX as I believe this was one of the main reasons for the gap between my TU vs EQ/EX scores.

Current FICO 8 Scores:

EQ 684

TU 656

EX 682

[mortimerwereback]

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@FireMedic1 wrote:

No negative info can be placed on a credit file after the file date. Since it happened 7+ months after DC. More since filing occurred. You can dispute it as a negative entry after filing. Send in proof of your filing date papers. Explain entry was past the file date. That should take care of it. Even though it was updated late. Was it updated with the old date of the late payment?

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Update Regarding TransUnion Dispute:

Just wanted to update everyone regarding the dispute I'd submitted to TransUnion. My report was corrected and TransUnion came through! I'd like to give a huge "THANK YOU!" to @FireMedic1 for the sage advice to submit a dispute. On my annualcreditreport.com TU report, it now shows: Date Updated and Last Payment Made as January 2021 (my Ch. 7 discharge date).

Previously the incorrect dates that were showing were: Last Payment Made: June 2021 (which was incorrect since my Ch. 7 was discharged in Jan 2021). And Date Updated: July 2021 (which was the month TU was using as a point of reference for the 1 YR 2 MO since  Late Payment Made).

My corrected TU report, shows 1 YR 9 MO since the last, Late Payment Made, which takes me back to my Ch. 7 discharge date of January 2021.

EX and EQ are still showing 2 YR 6 MO (which is a 9 month difference) but they are basing it off of my Chapter 13 start date. Technically, this is the correct date, but I'll take the correction as it stands. I searched my archives and I don't have any papers showing the transition from my Ch 13 to my Ch 7, nor any way to prove that I stopped making payments to the Camry on April 2020, so I'm thinking I'll leave it as is.

In any case, I'm very pleased with the resolution. With this final correction, all dates post BK discharge are accurate. I didn't receive any points to my FICO 8 scores as a result. Perhaps when it reaches 2 YR past I'll receive a few.

[FireMedic1]

Oh cool. Glad it worked out for ya @mortimerwereback . Yes the file date is the brickwall. No negs after that. If so then its lawyer time if the dispute doesnt work. Judges dont care for funny business and the fine of $1000 they dont want to lose. Nice! And your welcome.

[mortimerwereback]

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@FireMedic1 wrote:

Oh cool. Glad it worked out for ya @mortimerwereback . Yes the file date is the brickwall. No negs after that. If so then its lawyer time if the dispute doesnt work. Judges dont care for funny business and the fine of $1000 they dont want to lose. Nice! And your welcome.

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Yes, again, thank you!

It's kind of odd when I think about it. I'd always though that the 1 YR 2 MO date was off, but I wasn't motivated to do anything about it. Perhaps thinking, "oh I'm sure it's fine, or I'm sure it's right..." I guess in my head I just wanted to be past it. But there was such a discrepancy vs. EX and EQ that it bothered me. And then your post about "no negs" after the discharge date emboldened me to get off my butt and submit the dispute. Your one response made the difference.