Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act

The law behind every letter we send

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) is a federal law that governs what can appear on your credit report and what happens when you challenge it. A few provisions matter most for what you're doing right now:

§611 — the right to dispute. If you tell a bureau an item is inaccurate, they're required to investigate — typically within 30 days — and either verify the information as accurate, correct it, or delete it if it can't be verified. "We couldn't confirm this is accurate" is a legally sufficient reason for a bureau to remove something.

§623 — furnisher obligations. The company that reported the information (a bank, a collector, a landlord) has its own legal duty to investigate once it's notified of a dispute, and to correct or stop reporting information it can't verify.

§609 — your right to access. You're entitled to see what's in your file and, per §611, to see the results of any investigation and get a free updated report if something changes.

What "verified" actually means

A lot of disputes come back "verified as accurate" — but verification has a real legal bar. A furnisher can't just say "yep, that's ours" from memory; they're expected to have an actual factual basis. A vague or generic verification response, or a furnisher that goes quiet and never responds within the window, can itself become the basis for an escalation letter citing the furnisher's own obligations under §623.

This is the legal foundation every letter in your plan is built on — we're not asking bureaus and furnishers for a favor, we're invoking a process federal law already requires them to run.