It is your right and responsibility to assure the accuracy of the items on your credit reports. If information recorded on your credit reports does not accurately represent your behavior as a consumer, then you have the right to request that questionable information be removed from your reports. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) and the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) afford you the legal right to dispute inaccurate items on your credit reports with the credit bureaus and your individual creditors.

The most popular method for restoring bad credit is the credit bureau dispute. Because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you have the right to dispute and delete any items on your credit report that you feel are inaccurate, untimely, misleading, biased, incomplete or unverified.

When you dispute a questionable negative credit item with the credit bureaus, you are demanding that they perform an investigation to determine whether or not the item should be listed on your credit reports. If the credit bureau cannot verify the accuracy of the item, then they are required to correct the listing or completely delete it from your credit report.

Another facet of credit repair is to work with your creditors to remove the negative items from your credit reports. Your creditors have the ability to delete negative items from your credit reports at any time. With more cooperative creditors, sometimes all it takes is to ask the creditor to adjust or delete a negative credit listing. In situations where this non-confrontational approach is not sufficient, the various consumer protection acts provide you with tools for forcing creditors and collections agencies to prove the accuracy of the reported accounts.

By using some or all of their legal rights to fair and accurate credit reporting, thousands of people have legally and successfully restored their credit and increased their credit score.