Why your three credit reports do not agree

People are often surprised to find that they do not have a credit report. They have three, one at each nationwide bureau, and the three routinely disagree.

Reporting is voluntary

No law requires a lender to report your account to a credit bureau, and none requires it to report to all three. A card you have paid perfectly for six years may appear on two files and be missing from the third. The missing one is not an error anybody made; it is a choice the lender made.

The clocks are not synchronised

Furnishers send updates on their own cycles, and the bureaus process them on theirs. A balance you paid on the 2nd may show as paid on one report and as outstanding on another for weeks. If a lender pulls the second one, that is the version of you they see.

Identity is matched, not known

Bureaus match incoming data to a file using name, address, date of birth and Social Security number. Common names, a junior and a senior at the same address, a misspelling on an application, a house you moved out of — each of those is a way for somebody else’s account to land on your file, or yours to land on theirs.

Why this matters before a mortgage

Mortgage lenders generally pull all three and work from the middle score. That makes your weakest file the one that decides the rate, which is exactly the file people have never looked at.

What to do about it

Read all three, not one. Compare them item by item, and treat anything that appears on one and not the others as a question rather than a fact. Where an item is inaccurate, erroneous, false or obsolete, you may dispute it with that bureau — free of charge, on your own, or with us preparing the correspondence for you.