Equifax? or local council?

chicken7777

Hi guys. I've been having a few problems with my credit recently for companies that mainly just use Equifax. I bought a report from them, actually two, and the address is what seems to be the problem. As i saw earlier in a part of the forum, Experian can identify variations of an address. All my credit agreements for all my banks come up on Equifax when i use a report for my house number being "36" (most of my bank statements either say 36 or A 36) but no electoral roll :S. If i then get a report saying "Flat A, 36" my electoral roll comes up but NONE of my credit agreements are displayed!!! I don't know what to do because... Flat A 36 is the same as A 36 and i technically am under 36, 36A and Flat A 36 for my address realistically xD. I am not changing any of my credit agreements, can i go to my local council and tell them to add 36 and 36A to my electoral roll address?? Thanks alot guys .

bengalknights

No you just lodge a correction with equifax to have them all changed to 36 or with the relevant companys that report your address with the letters.

chicken7777

Thing is i spoke to Equifax last time and the woman said they were my choices. "Either tell all your banks and credit card providers the actual address on the electoral roll or change the address on the electoral roll" ... :S.... so ???? :mad::eek:

izools

I had the exact same problem a couple of years ago.

I wrote to Equifax (postal) explaining the issue and it was resolved within 30 days. They transposed all my agreements from XX Streetsville Road to Flat X, XX Streetsville Road, so that they were at the same address as the ER registration.

It was a darn strongly worded letter, mind. Just tried to find it for your reference but couldn't I'm afraid

Good luck though! :beer:

chicken7777

izools wrote: »

I had the exact same problem a couple of years ago.

I wrote to Equifax (postal) explaining the issue and it was resolved within 30 days. They transposed all my agreements from XX Streetsville Road to Flat X, XX Streetsville Road, so that they were at the same address as the ER registration.

It was a darn strongly worded letter, mind. Just tried to find it for your reference but couldn't I'm afraid

Good luck though! :beer:

Hi Izool . It's ok, thanks for looking. Could you give me a little example of what exactly i should write? My report finishes in a couple of days ... but i'll put my reference number anyway... they can't say they won't deal with me because i'm not with them anymore xD.

izools

Err...

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to you today in regard to a mismatch of data between my account addresses and the addresses you report them as being held at.

I have checked with Equifax, Call Credit, and Experian, and can confirm that the other two credit reference agencies record my accounts as being held at the same address as me electoral registration, and that they show the addresses as being identical.

You, however, have mistakenly recorded my accounts at a spurious address, which is different to the address at which the financial institutions actually hold for me.

Your colleagues have advised I update the address on my accounts to reflect what address the ER holds. They are already the same.

I therefore provide you 30 days to ensure that my accounts are relocated, on my EQ credit file, to the address at which you already see my ER registration, which is as follows:

XXX

Please note that I am aware this is possible as other people have had success with a request of this nature.

Ensure to advise by return once my lawful request has been actioned save referral of this matter to the ICO.

Kind Regards,

xxx

chicken7777

Wow thanks man!!! Now to get the address and i'm done xD. Thanks alot Izools , lets hope this works out .

CpdButWhy

chicken7777 wrote: »

Thing is i spoke to Equifax last time and the woman said they were my choices. "Either tell all your banks and credit card providers the actual address on the electoral roll or change the address on the electoral roll" ... :S.... so ???? :mad::eek:

I had a similar kind of issue with them, it is going to be a little long-winded, if you are not particularly interested, jump to the horizontal line, after that is my suggestion for your situation, but it helps to understand everything if you read my case with them.

Everything I write here is what happened to me, but is just my opinion on how things look on their side.

I live at Flat n, H (house), R road, London, Z (postcode), so my address correctly looks like: n H, R road, London, Z.

On my file they had the address looking like: n R road, London, Z. The postcode for "n R road" however is different from Z. Therefore the address they had on my file is not consistent, but not looking at the postcode it is an existing address. Because of that some of the letters sent to that address never arrives (it ends up in "n R road", London, Z* where Z* is a different postcode).

I complained to them on the phone after finding this out (and that they sent my credit report to the wrong address), filed a dispute, which they rejected with telling that they have it right, and they were not able to find my form of the address either on the electoral roll or in Royal Mail's database.

Of course their worker sending me the reply did not do anything, just sent me a template letter, without even verifying what she wrote, as:

1. Their version of address does not exist, as the post code does not correspond to the street address they have. I was however able to find my address from my postcode in Royal Mail website in minutes, once I found the search for address by postcode screen.

2. Everyone else, including Electoral Services has my version, with the small exceptions Royal Mail has it as n-m H, R road, London, Z postcode, where m is a number greater than n.

Actually, on a checkmyfile report, I also saw that my wife is also filed with the same wrong address to the correct postcode.

So in this case, clearly their database which stores the addresses belonging to each post code is wrong, even though from wherever (either Royal Mail or Electoral Roll) they got the data they imported is clearly correct.

So I phoned them up again, confronted another worker with the facts, she of course said that I should ask Electoral Roll to send them an update with my correct address.

Since Electoral Roll must have always sent them the correct address, because they have it correctly anyway, therefore this surely wouldn't have had any positive effect. When she did not understand this, I requested that she connects me to her manager because she is clearly incapable of solving (or even comprehending) the situation.

For some reason, they clearly don't like to connect anyone to their managers... I wasn't ever able to actually make any of their workers do that. But at least they always become a more susceptible to convincing to actually do something. In this case she divulged a fax number to which I can send my proof that everything is correct the way I say it. You can actually find the number on the internet.

After this I sent them a long letter on the fax explaining everything clearly as if you were explaining to ... (I don't write to who, if they read this they may get offended, although for no reason since this impression is quite deserved).

To back up what I wrote, I sent the following along in the fax:

- Relevant pages from my printed Experian Credit Report showing my correct address is known and recognized by Experian.
- Relevant page of my Callcredit Credit Report showing my correct address is also known and recognized by Callcredit.
- The official poll card the Electoral Services sent me last (in May, IIRC) showing that since they sent me the card to the correct address, they must have my version in their database and not Equifax's.
- The printout of the web site from Royal Mail showing my post code AND address correctly together (with the n-m discrepancy which should be properly understandable to everyone), which is clearly a proof that Royal Mail does hold my address correctly, and also instructions on how to find it, since their worker clearly was not experienced enough for doing such a simple task (this way I don't imply that she was simply lazy to even try :-) ).

I phoned them 2 days after faxing this to ensure that they did not misplace the fax. It was confirmed, that it was received, so I tried to ask the worker to do something about it. Of course she tried the "You need to ask Electoral Services to send us a confirmation that my version is the correct one." argument, however in this situation she did have no chance. It turned out, that she read only the letter, and did not even look at the "attachments", and thought that she can talk her way out of having to do anything...

Instead of letting her do that, I just told her to look at the attachments. Once she looked at it (including the screenshot from the Royal Mail website), she then wanted me to ask Electoral Services to send them a mail to correct the data as n-m H, R road, London, Z postcode.

Clearly she was not able to make the considerable jump to understand that n-m means flats n-m, and flat n is among the flats in that address, but I don't live in all the flats, only in flat n. You should not think that it was because her arithmetic skills did not encompass working with such big numbers because both n and m are single-digit numbers.

After a further ten minutes of explaining that they don't need ANOTHER letter from Electoral Services as the poll card was sent from Electoral Services from my council and shows my correct address, and it is not "n-m ...", she actually was willing to pass on my case to someone who actually will do something about it, and also added the urgency flag to it, and promised that someone will attend to it within 48 hours.

It was to my greatest surprise, that I found out after calling them two days later in the evening that they indeed has done something about it, and even the right thing, finally, and corrected my address.

I wonder if they corrected only my address, or they corrected their address-by-postcode lookup table, in the latter case the credit reports of some other people living at the same post code could be corrected, too. Or changed from one wrong address to a closer but still wrong address, considering not only flats n-m have my same post code, but also other flats with flat number outside of the n-m interval. Yeah, data cleansing sucks, when you have to push it through computer and IT architecture illiterates.

---

As for your case, first you should find out what exactly is your address on the electoral roll. Experian can be quite helpful in finding that out, they managed to find out that the Electoral Roll actually holds my flat number in the house number field, my house name in the street field, and street name (R road) in the locality (town) field. Anyway, it is just the concatenated form which the poll card is addressed to is what matters.

For Royal Mail, just go by searching for address by post code and see what addresses it lists, and choose the most specific matching one.

If these two are different, then you need to make Electoral Services in your council to fix their data, as I expect Royal Mail is the authoritative source of data for address and postcode mapping (it is called POSTcode after all) and THEY REALLY will not change it. Possibly you need to ask Royal Mail to ask Electoral Services to fix their data.

Equifax seem to be possible to be convinced that Number intervals in Royal Mail may cover multiple flats, so such small mismatches can be lived with.

Once these two match sufficiently, you can ensure that the credit accounts are also for this address, if necessary you indeed need to make the credit account providers to change it. If you did need to have a credit account address changed, then your address in the Equifax credit report may actually be fixed by that time... unlikely, though.

However once all such addresses correspond with each other (this can very well already be your case), then you can confront Equifax with this reality. If the workers insist someone else needs to do something, ask for their managers. That seems to help.

Anyway, Equifax's address storage schema and address entering logic is clearly badly designed and whoever did that should just be fired (in all related meanings of the word). Because of that they are not even able to represent the quite possible situation that you have been living in the UK for less than 6 years, preventing you from registering for any of their services other than submitting questions.

Their concession as a CRA should just be revoked because they are clearly not up to the task of managing such data responsibly and correctly. Unfortunately that most likely will never happen.