CRA and Incorrect Data

David69622

My friend is trying to get a mortgage and has discovered a financial association with his mother that he has never had and a CCJ which was issued when he was 16.
It appears that these relate to his father who has the same name and same address until 15 months ago.
Surely it is the CRAs responsibility to make sure they apply to the correct person and not the person’s responsibility to prove it isn’t them?

eskbanker

Obviously the theory is that all data provided to CRAs is accurate and that their data matching and consolidation processes are faultless, but, equally obviously, mistakes will always happen when dealing with this sort of volume and quality of data, not helped of course when parents are unimaginative enough not to give their offspring a different name!

Like any other organisations processing personal data, the CRAs have obligations under data protection legislation to ensure that such data is accurate and up to date, so each will have processes to follow to allow such mistakes to be corrected, but inevitably there is some burden of proof on the applicant to evidence their identity - how far has your friend got through this process so far?

David69622

Currently awaiting a response from both the CRA and the Debt management company MEIII who appear to have taken out the CCJ. Unfortunately the courts don’t appear to bother attaching a DOB to CCJs

David69622

Equifax have now managed to put on his report that he has been on the electoral register since 6 years before he was born!

Nasqueron

Complain to the ICO

MrFrugalFever

David69622 said:

My friend is trying to get a mortgage and has discovered a financial association with his mother that he has never had and a CCJ which was issued when he was 16.
It appears that these relate to his father who has the same name and same address until 15 months ago.
Surely it is the CRAs responsibility to make sure they apply to the correct person and not the person’s responsibility to prove it isn’t them?

Surely it is your friends responsibility to thoroughly check his credit file reports with all three agencies well in advance of any mortgage application (or indeed any credit/bank account/utility application). That way errors like these can be spotted in good time and hopefully corrected, in good time.

He/She will need to raise a dispute for each piece of erroneous data with each lender and follow their process, which, unfortunately, can take several months to feed through.

David69622

Some of these things are recently added and some in the background over both reports and not visible until applying for a mortgage! Can I suggest that negative comments about what should’ve been done are a waste of your time and mine?

sourcrates

If your friends data is being confused with his fathers data, then they will have to go back to each company that is wrongly reporting it with a complaint to that effect, the CRA only display information that they are given, it needs correcting at source, otherwise the original creditor will just come back and say the data is correct, and you will have wasted time and effort for nothing.