Your business credit report contains information about where your business is located, how you pay the bills, recent loans or credit lines, and whether you have filed for bankruptcy. Checking to ensure that this information is accurate is very important considering a substantial percentage of consumers are reporting errors on their credit reports. Maintaining this data is very imperative considering it is used to determine your business’s eligibility for financial products such as a loan or insurance. Let’s look at what options you have at your disposal when it comes to dealing with erroneous credit reports.

The most common way of dealing with an erroneous credit report is to directly challenge the information with the national credit reporting agency. Agencies such as Equifax, Experian, and Transunion can be contacted in many different ways including email, letter or by phone. Your communication should clearly identify each item in your report you dispute, state the facts and explain why you dispute the information, and request that it be removed or corrected. When the credit bureaus receive your dispute, they are obligated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act to list the offensive item as being “in dispute.” They are also obligated to contact the counter party, usually a bank or collection agency, and verify the accuracy of the information in dispute. This process usually takes place within a 30-45 day timeframe. If the counter party cannot verify the dispute, the reporting agency must remove the item from your credit report. Unfortunately, this information is not necessarily spread across all reporting agencies, so if you have an erroneous item with all three agencies, you will have to dispute with each one.

You can also file a dispute directly with the party that furnished the false allegation to the credit bureaus. While uncommon, simply reach out to the other party stating you wish to dispute the false information on your report. The other party is obligated to communicate with each credit bureau, while conducting their own investigation on the false allegation. If it is determined the allegation is indeed false, the correction must be sent to all three of the credit reporting agencies.

The newest way to file a dispute is to simply file the complaint in the CFPB credit report complaint database. The CFPB will forward the complaint to the other party and provide status updates as the investigation takes place. Once a resolution is met, the CFPB will forward the information to all relevant state and federal agencies. By far, this is the easiest and least stressful methods for dealing with an erroneous credit item.