Fixing errors on your credit file

A wrong listing on an Australian credit file is not an inconvenience to be “optimised”. It is personal information that a credit reporting body or a credit provider is holding, using and disclosing. The machinery for fixing it sits in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), in Part IIIA of that Act, and in the Credit Reporting Code. It does not sit in a paid dashboard, and it does not sit in a firm that promises to wipe whatever you would rather not see.

This publication is not a credit licensee and does not give credit assistance. ASIC’s Moneysmart material and the OAIC’s credit-reporting pages are the government-facing versions of the same process. Use them. Then write letters.

Wrong data is a rights issue, not a score hack

People come to this subject because a number moved, or because a lender said no. The productive question is narrower. Which listing is wrong, and in what respect? A default against an account you never held. A repayment-history month coded late when the payment cleared. An enquiry from a business you never dealt with. A judgment that belongs to someone with the same name.

If the listing is accurate, the correction process will not save you from it. Accurate adverse information expires on a clock, or it is lived with. Paid credit-repair marketing exists to blur that line. The repair-firm piece is the longer warning. This piece assumes you have read the reports at Equifax, Experian and illion, and that you can name the error.

The Privacy Act and the Credit Reporting Code

Credit reporting in Australia is a privacy system with a specialised code. Credit reporting bodies and credit providers have obligations about what they can collect, how long they can keep it, who they can disclose it to, and what they must do when you say it is wrong. You have a right to access your credit reporting information and a right to request correction of personal information that is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading.

Those words matter. “I do not like this default” is not a correction ground. “This default is not my account”, “the amount is wrong”, “notice was not given as required”, “the debt was settled before the listing”, “the enquiry was not authorised” — those are correction grounds, if you can evidence them.

The Credit Reporting Code is the operational text. It sets out how correction requests are to be handled, how credit reporting bodies and credit providers consult each other, and the sort of timeframes that apply. When a bureau or a bank quotes a period to you, ask which clause they are relying on. The privacy and credit reporting rights guide is the wider map.

Write to the credit provider first

Most of the information on a consumer credit file was furnished by a credit provider: a bank, a card issuer, a finance company, a telco, sometimes a utility. The provider is the one that knows whether the account existed, whether the amount was outstanding, whether a notice went out, and whether a repayment hit the account on the date the grid claims.

Write to that provider. Use a channel it cannot pretend it never received: a published corrections form if it has one, plus email or post to its privacy or credit-listings address, and a copy to its complaints or internal dispute resolution team if the listing has already caused harm. Name the bureau or bureaus where you saw the listing. Name the account. Name the date. Say what is wrong. Say what you want done — correction, update of status, removal if it should not have been listed. Attach the evidence. Ask for a written outcome.

Send the credit reporting body a copy. You can request a correction from the bureau as well, and in many cases you should, because the bureau is the one displaying the information to other subscribers. Starting with the provider is still the more efficient move for account-level facts. The bureau will often have to ask the provider anyway.

Write to the bureau first when the error looks like a matching problem rather than an account problem. Two people have been merged. Your file contains a middle name and a suburb that belong to someone else. A commercial listing has leaked into a consumer file. Public-record items, such as a judgment the bureau has collected, may also be a bureau-first problem, with the court file as your evidence. Even then, copy the provider if a provider’s name is on the listing.

Keep a register. Date sent, address used, what was attached, what was promised, when the thirty-day neighbourhood arrives. Correction disputes die from poor filing more often than from weak law.

Timeframes

The Credit Reporting Code expects correction requests to be dealt with in a defined period. In ordinary practice that period is about 30 days from the request. Consultation between a credit reporting body and a credit provider can sit inside that process. If they need more time, they should tell you.

Do not confuse that clock with the retention clock. The retention clock is how long a correctly listed item may remain. The correction clock is how long they have to investigate your claim that the item is wrong. A provider that says “it will fall off in three years, so there is nothing to do” is answering a question you did not ask.

If the outcome is a refusal, get it in writing. A refusal should say why the information is said to be accurate. You need that reason if you are going to the OAIC or to AFCA. While a correction is on foot, ask what they will do about disclosure so that new subscribers do not keep receiving an uncorrected version as if the dispute did not exist.

What evidence helps

Evidence is boring and decisive. Statements showing the payment that the repayment-history grid missed. A settlement letter. A tenancy history if the address matching is wrong. A police report or identity-theft file if someone else used your details. Correspondence in which the provider agreed the debt was not payable. A court search that shows no judgment, or a judgment against a different party.

What helps less: a speech about how the listing is hurting your score; a demand that they “remove it for goodwill”; a template downloaded from a repair firm that recites the Privacy Act without attaching a single document. Goodwill removals of accurate information are not a right.

Be precise about the remedy. “Update this default to paid as at this date” is a request. “Delete everything negative” is a wish. If the listing should not have been made at all, say why: no account, wrong person, required notice not given, listed too early, listed after a genuine dispute that was still on foot. If you paid a correctly listed default, send the receipt and ask for the status to reflect payment. Then stop expecting the line to disappear. Status and deletion are different outcomes.

When OAIC or AFCA is the next step

If the provider and the bureau have refused, stalled past a reasonable time, or answered a different question, you leave their counter.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is the privacy regulator. Credit reporting is a privacy jurisdiction. OAIC is the natural next step when the fight is about access to, correction of, or disclosure of credit reporting information. You will usually be expected to have complained to the organisation first. Take the paper trail.

The Australian Financial Complaints Authority is the external dispute resolution scheme for most financial firms. AFCA is the natural next step when the fight is also about the firm’s conduct as a credit provider — the debt, the listing decision, the hardship handling, the collections behaviour — and you have been through internal dispute resolution, or the IDR time has run. The complaints, IDR and AFCA guide is the process piece. AFCA is free for consumers. It is not a credit-repair shop.

Some listings sit with a telco or another business that may have its own ombudsman scheme. Use the scheme that actually covers the firm. Naming AFCA when the provider is not an AFCA member wastes months.

OAIC and AFCA decide complaints. They can require correction, and they can look at how a listing was made. They will not invent a right to have accurate information erased because a loan application is next month.

What you cannot have removed

You cannot, as a matter of right, have a correctly listed default, enquiry or judgment taken off because it is inconvenient. You cannot buy a lawful wipe of accurate repayment history. You cannot treat a credit reporting body as a court of appeal from a debt you in fact owe.

You can have wrong information corrected. You can have incomplete information completed — a paid status added, a closed date recorded. You can have out-of-date information updated when the rules say it is out of date. You can complain when a provider listed earlier than it was allowed to, or without the process the Code expects.

If the underlying problem is that you cannot pay, write a hardship letter, not a correction letter. If the underlying problem is that someone is offering to do this correspondence for a large upfront fee, read the repair-firm guide before you pay them to exercise a right you already have.

The law is on the side of a true file. That is a better fact than it sounds. It means you can force a correction when the file is false. It also means no one can honestly sell you a false file that looks nicer.