According to the FTC website ?No one can legally remove accurate and timely negative information from a credit report. The law allows you to ask for an investigation of information in your file that you dispute as inaccurate or incomplete.?

This is a message that seems very simple. In fact, many critics of credit repair and credit repair law firms such as Lexington Law will try to use this message to imply that the only recourse for people with a bad credit score is to wait for their credit to improve on its own. When you take time to research the laws surrounding credit reporting and your rights to dispute the negative information in your credit reports, however, you will find that the FTC quote above is much less black and white than critics of credit repair would have you believe.

This mostly has to do with the idea of inaccurate vs. accurate when it comes to the information included in your credit reports. When we typically think of these terms, we think of them according to how they are defined in a dictionary. In the credit reporting world, however, these two words mean something different. While they are not wholly redefined, the definitions of these two words as they are used in the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) are modified when they are applied to the credit reporting system.

When trying to get an idea of what is accurate when talking about your credit reports, it is helpful to identify those things that are not accurate.

To start with, there are items that are patently inaccurate or untimely. These are listings on your credit reports that belong to someone else, have been added more than once, are the result of identity theft, have been listed longer than 7 years, etc. Because of how the credit reporting system works, it is surprisingly common for these types of items to end up on your credit reports. In fact, studies show that a majority of credit reports contain these types of errors.

For many people, this is the only type of negative item they believe can be disputed and removed from a credit report. The truth is there are a number of other classifications of negative items on your credit reports that you have the right to dispute.

Along with disputing negative items that are patently inaccurate or untimely, you also have the right to dispute any item you feel is misleading, incomplete, ambiguous, unverifiable, biased or unclear.

The financial fallout from a divorce is a common way for these less obvious types of inaccurate credit listings to appear on your credit reports. Often times in a divorce, financial responsibilities are divvied up between the two spouses. One spouse may receive the house while the other receives a car and the credit cards. Each spouse is then responsible for the ongoing payments of the items they were assigned. The problem is that creditors do not have to abide by the terms of the divorce court. If one person stops payment on the mortgage, for example, because both names are on the paperwork, the lender will seek to collect payment from both people and if they do not receive this payment, they may report the delinquencies on both people's credit reports. So, even though only one spouse is living in the house and is responsible for making payments, the other can still have their credit score hammered by the lender.

In a case like this, the innocent spouse can clearly make the case that the delinquencies listed on their credit reports are misleading because they make their credit look bad even though they have done nothing wrong.