Yes, Credit bureaus have devised a system designed to speed the dispute process. Yet, this system, in many ways, can actually do more harm to your credit repair efforts than good. My discoveries will completely stun you. Read on!
Since credit reporting agencies get so many dispute letters every single day – hundreds of thousands – they had to find a way to keep up with the disputes. But not only to keep up the pace on all those incoming letters, but a solid method to handle those consumers’ disputes too. Because their response time is restricted only to 30-45 days (depending on how the consumer retrieved their credit reports), they needed a speedy route to answer to these consumers’ disputes. And then came the birth of two streamlined processes to serve this purpose.
OCR, which means ‘Optical Character Recognition’, is like a big scanner on steroids, as one wise credit expert put it. It was formulated to apprehend the words in your dispute letters and to even understand dispute letters as they come in. Additionally, it’s also formulated to automatically save the data it reads as well as correlate dispute letters against the hundreds of thousands of other dispute letters that have already been processed through this system.
E-Oscar, though was put together to electronically handle those disputes. Designed and created by the credit bureaus themselves, both the e-Oscar and OCR machinery were put together to speed the process in getting back to consumers about their dispute letters. But disturbingly enough, automated mechanisms don’t always work to the best benefit of the customer.
Once your letters have been opened with a letter opening machine, OCR steps in and is the 1st main computer system that your letters are subjected to when it reaches the credit bureaus. This rather advanced computerized scanning software literally looks at your letter, reads it, inspects it, & finally deciphers it. It immediately decides if it could be further processed through e-Oscar to the creditor or deemed as frivolous and basically tossed into the garbage. If the OCR machine establishes that the dispute letter is unique enough to be processed, the next automated system takes over – e-OSCAR – but if not, you’ve simply thrown away your time and energy.
In E-Oscar, dispute letters are crunched in to a two character code. Furthermore, only one dispute can be entered at a time for each reporting item. This boils down to the fact that if you have more than 1 dispute within that specific credit item (for example, the dates the account was opened or the last date of activity on it, the actual balance on that account, late payments if any, or even the reporting credit limit, and so forth), only one of your disputes might be entered in e-Oscar – usually the first one listed. Again, this also translates into wasted time and energy, thus some of your disputes may never be processed unless you continuously follow up.
Despite what it seemed like on the surface of things and despite the fact that everyone thought this technology would speed up all the work, and logically speed up processing our disputes, there’s still the fact that these machines have limitations and faults too. For instance, here’s a pretty discouraging fact that’ll really make you wonder – did you know that e-Oscar has a specialty called reply all which actually allows the data furnisher to reply to a batch number of disputed files as Verified without ever even opening and investigating the file?! Personally, I call that a sham and every consumer should know about it as it affects all our credit ratings! Whats even more disturbing is that this “reply all” feature is not illegal so you can see why it’s so important that we look out for our own best interests and good credit.
Your personal credit score is so important that we should not let computers do the processing. That being said, the ultimate goal in credit repair is to basically get around the computerized process in an effort to have your letters ultimately fall into the hands of a real person. We should affirm our desire to have real humans processing the information about our financial records and disputes because the computerized system can’t really get a grip on the complexity of our individual circumstances. I’m sure you would agree that it’s just completely cruel to consumers when these credit reporting agencies don’t follow through on their responsibility to the people as required by law.
