Check Your Electoral Register Status

Bluesdad

I made application for a mobile phone sim card from Virgin Mobile on 3 January this year and was rejected at the credit check stage. Virgin Media won't tell me why the automatic check came up with a refusal and the manual check that I believe I am entitled to appears to have got lost in their system somewhere.

I get a regular copy of my credit report from Equifax and I downloaded a fresh copy after I was refused the phone sim. Every section is up to date with not one missed payment and there are no CCJs, linked Addresses or gone aways. However in the electoral register part of the report it is flagged up in red and although it confirms that I have been on record at my current address for 24 years the section that says "confirmed at present" is marked NO. There is nothing else in my credit report that would give reason for refusal. For those of you that know the equifax style of report it is straight greens all the way through except the electoral register

Equifax explain in their help pages about why the records have not been updated and it revolves round a change in the dates the electoral rolls are now being produced in Scotland. This is a quote from the Equifax site

"This year new Electoral Registers were published by local authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland on 1st December 2014. The updates are expected to show on credit reports in the first week of January 2015. If you subscribe to an Equifax monitoring service, you will receive an alert to let you know that a change has been made to your report.

The Electoral Registers are expected to be published in Scotland by 2nd March 2015. If you live in Scotland, we will update your information once the registers have been received from each of the individual local authorities and loaded to our database. We expect this to be completed by the end of March. In the meantime, your 2014 registration will still be considered as up to date."

I contacted Equifax to ask why if my 2014 registration is still considered up to date my electoral registration status at the moment is not confirmed and they claim that this section means confirmed in 2015 and there is no way they can change this section until they get the 2015 electoral registers for Scotland in March. They further stated that it was not a problem since a manual check of my credit score would show that I have been registered at my current address for the number of years shown. I could apply to add a notice of correction but that would not change the status and would only be apparent if a manual check of my credit report was done

Getting a reason for the automatic refusal or a manual check from Virgin Mobile is a whole different story but I can understand why a "not confirmed" on the electoral register might prompt an automated system to throw out your application.

If you live in Scotland and have access to your experian report check it now and lobby to have this status altered:mad: