Chapter Nine 

Your Fruit Cocktail of Credit Rights

The more a person speaks with actual people with actual bad credit, the more that person begin to feel that the practical reality of credit ethics is completely convoluted. But the confusion doesn't even start there. The law itself, as it pertains to credit reporting and credit scoring, is grossly complicated and confusing. Because judges usually respond to reason (instead of legal theory), the courts have heard credit accuracy cases and have expanded the law to fit common sense. This is great news for regular people, but when a judge imposes common sense on federal law, it creates some of its own funkiness.

Each judge, works within his own jurisdiction that could include a single state, a region of the country or the entire nation. Only the Supreme Court of the United States can interpret law to impose it on the whole country. So, judges around the country have imposed common sense on the law but have done it in a patchwork quilt-fashion. In one area of the country, the controlling case law may define inaccuracy one way and in another part of the country, the controlling case law may say something different. The net result of all this legal work has been to create a colorful fruit cocktail of legal rights and judicial interpretation. Now, it's anyone's guess as to what kind of credit listing is "accurate" and what kind of credit listing is "inaccurate."

The Fair Credit Reporting Act supplies several reasons for disputing negative credit. If a credit item is "inaccurate," "incomplete," "unverifiable" or "untimely," it must be removed from the credit report if the person challenges it. Subsequently, as various credit accuracy cases have floundered their way through the courts, decisions have been made by judges deciding that questionable credit listings should also be deleted if they are found to be "misleading" "biased," "ambiguous," or "unclear." On top of this, nobody has clearly defined any of these terms, so it's anyone's guess as to whether a particular credit item is "inaccurate," "incomplete," "misleading," "biased," "untimely," "ambiguous," "unclear" or "unverifiable." When reviewing the court cases that have set and expanded these definitions, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the judge simply applied reason to the question and then wrapped the definition of "inaccurate" around common sense.

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

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