Chapter Eight 

Credit Errors: As Simple as Black & White
(With a Massive Heap of Gray)

What is a credit error? Credit companies and long-winded consumer experts would go on and on about how simple credit errors are. Either negative credit information is right (meaning that the bill was paid late), or it was wrong (meaning that the bill wasn't paid late). Judging by their two-dimensional response, one could properly conclude that neither the credit companies nor the consumer experts have actually ever met a "consumer" in the flesh. Once you begin to talk to actual people with actual negative credit on their credit file, and you hear their stories and how their negative credit came about, the black and white world of credit errors becomes a hopeless swirling mess of gray. What's more, when you involve the lawyers (if you dare), and you begin to research the case law surrounding credit inaccuracy, you discover that the definition of "inaccurate credit" is hopelessly complicated.

The people who're paid to differentiate between which credit listings a person should dispute and which they should not, are professionals who usually don't really have the foggiest clue what actual people in actual life are experiencing when they struggle with the world of credit. These "consumer experts" go about their day making pronouncements about "consumers" without much practical knowledge regarding what it's really like to be a typical American. Even in the oft-used term "consumer," the experts reveal an impersonal view of people as machines that use up goods and services (eg. "consumers.") Who's going blame them, though? It's not like the consumer experts and regulatory pundits man "consumer' help lines where they receive hundreds of calls a day from normal people telling reciting story after story about how credit reporting is unfair. Without putting themselves in a position to speak with actual people, there's no way an expert would guess the complexity of the world of credit accuracy/inaccuracy. Credit correction attorneys, on the other hand, actually do man "help lines" where hundreds of people call in to discuss their credit dilemmas. Perhaps, it's because of this that these attorneys have a healthier respect for the gray areas surrounding credit disputes.

The average person (as well as many experts) have a logical, but completely erroneous, view of credit accuracy or inaccuracy. If you ask a "consumer advocate" to give an example of a person who has "accurate" bad credit, they usually tell a story like this:

Credit Revolution: Path of the Smart Consumer
© 2007 John C. Heath, Esq., Dr. Randy Padawer, Jayson R. Orvis. All Rights Reserved.
Published by Far Cliffs Multimedia, LLC

More information about fixing credit errors

What does it mean to fix bad credit?
Fixing Your Credit Becomes Necessary in a Broken Credit System
What is an Accurate Credit Listing?