The credit reports are an important aspect in our daily lives, given the fact that it is increasingly used everywhere and has a huge impact on the economy in the US. It is important for lenders, regulators, consumers, financial institutions etc., and all of them have a vested interest in these reports. Hence it becomes imperative that we understand the quality of the data that is contained in these credit reports.

The accuracy of the credit reports has been a topic of discussion and there are many questions that have been raised by the research groups and various studies have been conducted to look into the various aspects. This includes the accuracy of the report itself, the dispute and the resolution process, the impact it has on the customers and their creditworthiness etc. The result of these studies that are conducted will vary depending on the entity that is conducting the research. The overall methodology that is used and the approach it has will have a bearing on the results.

Recently there were some findings that were released by the non-profit organization PERC (The Policy and Economic Research Council) with regard to the accuracy and the quality of data that is being collected and processed by Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. The findings suggested that, in general, the information that was contained in these credit reports was of very high quality. Even in such cases where there were some inaccuracies and disputes; there was very little chance of that having an adverse impact on the consumers.

Some of the highlights of the research are:

-          At least 19.2% of these credit reports that the consumers examined contained potentially inaccurate information. But only one half of them related to header information were found to be inaccurate. For instance, they had misspelled the name of the street or the name of the employer. This information had absolutely no bearing on the credit scores.

-          There was less than 1% of all the tradelines which contained information that could be disputed.

-          There were only .93% of these credit reports which had some disputes which resulted in an increase in the credit scores (25 points or more). While the rest of the resolved disputes had no impact on the scores and in fact some resulted in the scores going down.

-          A majority of the disputing parties were satisfied with the outcomes of the dispute.

-          Only .5% of the reviewed credit reports had changes which increased the credit scores marginally.

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