How to Dispute a Business Credit Report: 6 Steps Without the FCRA's Protections

A company disputing its own credit file has fewer rights than its owner has disputing a personal one, and most of the work is done somewhere other than the bureau. The statute people have in mind when they talk about credit disputes protects individuals. A business report is corrected by persuasion, by documents, and, where the error is a public filing, by fixing the filing itself.

1. Start From the Protections You Do Not Have

Under 15 U.S.C. 1681i(a)(1)(A), when a consumer disputes an item in the consumer's file, the agency must conduct a reasonable reinvestigation free of charge within 30 days of receiving the notice, and under 1681i(a)(5)(A) it must delete or modify information it finds inaccurate, incomplete, or unverifiable. The same statute defines a consumer as an individual.

A corporation is not one. Nothing in the consumer dispute machinery requires Dun and Bradstreet, Experian's business unit, or Equifax's business products to reinvestigate a company's complaint on a statutory clock, and the seven year reporting limits that govern personal files do not by their own force govern business reports. An owner who writes to a business bureau citing the FCRA is citing a law written for someone else.

What remains is each bureau's own process, which is real, published in part, and voluntary.

2. Get the Report That Contains the Error

A dispute has to name what is wrong on the page a lender saw. Order or pull the report from the bureau that carries the error, since the three business files are built separately and an entry on one may be absent from the others. Dun and Bradstreet lets an owner review and update the company's information free; Experian and Equifax sell their reports, Equifax through resellers.

3. Sort Each Error by Where It Came From

Business report errors come in three kinds, and each has a different address. Identity errors (a wrong name, an old address, a predecessor's officers) belong to the bureau itself. Payment errors, such as a late payment that was not late, belong to the supplier that reported them. Public record errors, meaning a UCC filing or a judgment, belong to the filing office or court that holds the original, and the bureau is only repeating it.

That third category is where a dispute can circle for months, because the owner keeps writing to the copy.

4. Ask the Supplier to Correct What It Sent

A trade entry is a supplier's account of how the company paid. D&B describes its PAYDEX score as calculated from trade experiences submitted by suppliers and vendors, which means a wrong entry originates in someone's receivables department. Write to that department, attach the invoice, the remittance record, and the bank confirmation, and ask it to correct its next submission and to notify the bureau. Suppliers have no statutory duty to do this for a business customer. Some will anyway, since a customer who pays is worth a letter.

5. Fix the Public Record Where It Lives

A paid judgment that still shows as open on a business report is usually open on the docket too. In New York, CPLR 5020 requires a judgment creditor that receives satisfaction to execute and file a satisfaction-piece with the proper clerk and to mail a copy to the debtor within ten days after filing. If the creditor fails to file within twenty days after receiving full satisfaction, the statute exposes it to a penalty recoverable by the debtor, $100 where the judgment was under $5,000 and $500 where it was $5,000 or more. Get the satisfaction-piece filed, then send the bureau the docketed copy.

UCC filings take a different route. When the secured obligation is gone and no commitment remains, the debtor can demand a termination under 9-513 and, if the secured party fails its duty, may authorize a termination under the uniform 9-509(d)(2). When the filing was never authorized, or states something inaccurate, the uniform UCC 9-518 lets the person named file an information statement identifying the record and explaining why it is wrong.

An information statement is a letter to the record, not an eraser.

Section 9-518(e) says as much: filing one does not affect the effectiveness of the financing statement. It puts the debtor's position into the same index a lender searches, next to the filing it contests, and that is sometimes enough to change a credit officer's reading, which is a strange sort of remedy, one that works the way a note taped to a museum placard works, disputing the attribution without removing the painting from the wall. New York's enacted version of 9-518 should be checked before relying on the uniform wording, and a filing that a secured party is actively enforcing is a matter for counsel, not for a form.

Whether a bureau will carry the information statement into its own report, or go on showing the original filing as if nothing had been said, is not something any published policy answers.

Once the source is corrected, the bureau dispute in the next step becomes a request to update a copy, which is a much easier thing to grant than a request to disbelieve one.

6. File the Bureau Dispute With the Corrected Source Attached

Experian publishes its business process: use the Submit Data Dispute button at the bottom of the report, or email the report to BusinessDisputes@Experian.com with a note naming the items to investigate. Experian says an investigation is generally completed within 30 days, though complex cases may take longer, and that if changes are made it will send a second complimentary report for confirmation. Basic facts such as name, address, and industry can be updated through businesscreditfacts.com.

For Dun and Bradstreet, begin with its free review and update of company information. For Equifax, confirm the dispute route with Equifax or the reseller that sold the report; its business dispute channel is not described on the page that sells the report, and there may be more than one, though that is a question for the phone.

A Clean Report Is Not the Same as a Resolved Debt

Some disputed entries are accurate. A merchant cash advance funder's UCC filing that reflects a live obligation will not come off because the owner disputes it, and a dispute is the wrong tool for a debt that is actually owed. Delancey Street, which works on business debt settlement and is not a law firm, reviews MCA and similar business obligations in confidence at no cost for the first consultation, and engages independently licensed counsel where a filing or judgment raises a legal question.

The record, in the end, follows the paper. Correct the paper, and the copies tend to follow in their own time.