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My FICO score dropped 100 points after my incompetent utility company posted false late payments. It had been 780 prior to the late payments.
I have a legitimate case but they are so bureaucratic and slow, my repeated calling and writing if proving futile. What is the best third party service or agency to go through to coerce them to remove the late payments from my credit repoort?
State governments generally regulate public utilities, although some states have a very laissez faire approach to regulation.
You should start by sending a certified letter to the utility that states:
If you hear nothing in 2-3 weeks, you escalate to the State government. File complaints with your state Attorney General, Consumer Affairs agency and Public Service Commission (that what's it's called in New York, your state will probably vary). Once you get acknowledgements from the regulators, call your local state legislative offices. Legislative staff can often help with these things as well.
It's a lot of work, but if you have a case and follow through you will be successful.
The credit report protest approach can work to, but you are basically sending a request into a black hole. If the utility is truly incompetent, you'll also run into issues where they re-submit negative credit records after the reporting agency removes them.
Note: The paper letter is absolutely essential to getting results.
Dispute the item on your credit report with whichever of the three major credit agencies are reporting it. This will start a process wherein the utility company will be forced to provide documentation that you did indeed make late payments. If they don't the item will be removed by the credit agency.
There are three possible outcomes:
1) The utility company doesn't want to hassle with the paperwork and will not respond to the inquiry and it will be removed from your credit report.
2) The utility company won't have the documentation and it will be removed from your credit report.
3) The utility company will provide whatever documentation they have (even if it is erroneous) and the credit agencies will take that as proof and leave it on your report. If YOU have any documentation that you paid on time, you might offer it to the credit agency and hope it is more convincing than their documentation. This outcome could go either way.
Sorry to hear that, man.
I don't really know what your recourse is, though. The way they see it is that you provided service, and you didn't pay. (Would you disagree with this? Based on what I've read here and on the other site, I wouldn't disagree.) Incompetence and computer glitches aside, you're still responsible for paying your bill in a timely manner.
Our power company last year screwed up a transfer of an account to our renter pretty badly. I kept getting bills for the property even though our tenants (who are model tenants in every sense of the word) stayed on top of this. I paid the bills, but the power company refused to "roll back" the account to what it was so they could pay. The bottom line (literally) was that they had the money, and they weren't about to trade having money for not having money.
(What ended up being the problem was that they got the address of the property wrong. How they did this, I haven't a clue.)
It's unfortunate that things work this way, that we have to babysit our financial obligations. Things should "just work" but they sometimes don't, and the high-priced legal team almost always is on the other side, and they've written up the customer agreements so that they are largely absolved of liability for things like this.
This isn't comforting, sorry, but the pragmatic lesson is to make sure your ducks are still in a row whenever something substantive happens about the way you pay your bills.
In fact, I need to check with my mortgage company, because I think I just went paperless. :)
