Consumer credit reports are ideally supposed to provide others with accurate and complete information regarding a consumer's credit history and associated scoring.
To that end, collections are to remain up to the period set by congress for their exclusion, which is no later than 7 years plus 180 days from the date of your first delinquency on the OC account that created the debt, and where you have remained delinquent up to the time of the collection.
Absent any issues of legitimacy of the debt or of current collection authority, the way to obtain removal prior to the full statutory exclusion period is to request the debt collector to voluntarily delete their reporting. That almost always requires the consumer to first pay the asserted debt as a condition for any voluntary deletion.
However, debt collectors agree in their reporting agreements with the CRAs not to delete their reporting based on payment of the debt, as the CRAs want their credit reports to be as complete and accurate as possible, thus improving their value/saleability.
The consumer can always request a pay for delete, but many debt collectors will, as a matter of general policy, decline.
As for first disputing, a dispute should only be filed if there is a specific inaccuracy, and unless the asserted inaccuracy is the legitimacy of the debt itself, resolution of the dispute will onlyy extend to the correction, verification, or deletion of the specific information that is basis for the dispute.
It is not, if the debt itself is valid, basis for deletion of an entire collection.
Try offering a pay for deletion, and hope that the debt collector grants......
