You fell behind on your payments and your creditor decided to pursue a judgment against you. Even though you appeared at the hearing, your creditor was granted the judgment. Now, you don’t know what to do or where to turn to delete the judgment entry from your credit report.
The judgment has caused your credit score to free-fall. In point of fact, a judgment can stay on your credit report for 10-12 years. At the end of this period, if the judgment remains unpaid, it can often be renewed. Your credit history can even report a paid judgment for seven years!
Now, you would like to remove the judgment from your credit report. You need to be aware that it is illegal for credit reporting agencies to remove accurate entries. There are only two ways an entry can be legally removed from a credit report. The first way is to prove that an item is inaccurate. The second way is to dispute the item and, if the creditor cannot verify the item within a legally specified time frame, the credit reporting agency is legally required to remove the item. Items which consumers believe are false can be disputed pursuant to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Included in the FCRA, are judgment and public record items.
To dispute a judgment on your credit report, you should send a dispute letter to the credit bureaus which are reporting the judgment. There are three major credit reporting agencies – TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. With other types of negative entries such as credit card debt and car loans, the credit reporting agency would be forwarding the dispute to creditors such as credit card companies, banks, car dealerships, loan companies, etc.
Unlike car loans and credit cards, judgment and public record information is located in governmental buildings and maintained by county personnel. In light of this, a judgment dispute will be forwarded in most cases to the county courthouse in your county. As humans verify this type of information, as opposed to fancy software programs, it normally takes longer to verify this type of dispute and, in many cases, the verification is not able to be completed within the specified time frame of 30 days. When this happens, the credit reporting agency, by law, must remove the judgment entry from your credit report.
You can attempt this process yourself. However, if you would prefer, you can employ a knowledgeable and experienced consumer rights attorney to address this for you. The upside to going this route is that an attorney who practices consumer rights law has typically handled hundreds, and possibly even thousands, of cases of this type.