An individual can obtain his credit report once every 12 months. In order to get updated credit reports, a person can request his report to one of the 3 bureaus: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, after every 4 months. In this way an accurate current credit status present with the bureaus can be obtained.
Credit reports hold critically important personal informations about a person and more preferably kept secret. Hardly anyone of us would like to share his credit report information with others. As they contain information about the residence of a person, his criminal records, had there been any, whether the person was sued, faced bankruptcy, and bill payment history.
Credit bureaus sell these informations to different entities for different purposes. Credit reports sold to creditors and lenders are given to evaluate a person’s credibility, helping out the creditors to decide the case in your favor or against. Insurance companies require the informations enclosed in credit report to evaluate a person’s payment habit, pattern and schedule.
In many cases employers also get Credit Reports before employing a person so that their company should have employees with clean financial records. Other businesses may sometime need a person’s credit report while going for a partnership. Obtaining Credit Report on somebody else is not an easy and simple task. The FACT; Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions and FCRA; Fair Credit Reporting Act details the consumer’s rights quite clearly.
Credit Reports are required in instances of house renting too. A house owner can require a person’s credit report to ensure timely receipt of rent from the tenant. It is important to mention, that only the above mentioned have legal rights to access anyone else’s credit report. Whereas, it is a general misconception that people can obtain someone else’s credit report to know his financial current status by giving a logical reasoning to the credit bureaus.
Trying and obtaining someone else’s credit report is not a strange thing. Such cases are common in person to person loan lending and receiving back. When the debtors fail to fulfill his commitment of paying back, the creditors mostly start seeking for the debtor’s finances by trying to obtain debtor’s credit report. FCRA holds certain privacy policies for the consumer financial records and does not allow anyone to get hold of others’ credit reports for such purposes.
As mentioned above, businesses, employers, insurance companies, house owners and banks can have an access to a person’s credit report. All these are authorized by FCRA to obtain other persons’ credit information. Otherwise a common man can’t get hold of other’s credit report. A person can let another person get his credit report by providing him a written permission.
An authorized agent of the credit bureau will then be required to sign up to accomplish the process. Direct correspondence with the bureaus in this regard will be fruitless and tiresome. Some of the well known agents are:
Know X – Access to all publicly available records about yourself and others, and US Search – Access to all publicly available records about yourself and others.
