I received the following question from a twitter follower and fellow CrossFitter today. If you have a credit question for me please feel free to add them as a comment to any of my SmartCredit articles. I check the comments every day. Or you can send them to me via Twitter @johnulzheimer
“I have a few credit card companies that are only reporting to one or two bureaus, but not all three. This is hurting my credit score with one of the bureaus. Is there anything I can do to get that history added? I had credit issues about six years ago so I desperately need those good accounts showing!”
The short answer to her question is no, there is nothing you can do. You cannot force any lender or financial services company to report to the credit bureaus? There is nothing in the Fair Credit Reporting Act that requires anyone to report anything to any credit reporting agency.
Further, even if a lender wants to report to the credit bureau there’s no guarantee that they’ll accept the information. In order to report anything to a credit bureau you have to have an account with that credit bureau. That’s why some lenders don’t report to all three…they don’t want an account with three credit reporting agencies and are comfortable with reporting their loan information to one credit bureau.
The lack of information on a credit report does NOT lower your credit scores. Credit scores are only influenced by information that’s actually on your credit reports. But, you could make an argument that your scores would be higher if the item was being reported and was being considered by a credit scoring model.
For example, if your scores are low because you have a high credit card “balance to limit ratio” then you could argue that adding a credit card to the credit report (especially one with a large unused credit limit) would result in a higher score. But you can’t argue that the credit card issuer is causing you to have a lower score because there’s nothing that requires them to report.
You could also argue that because your power bill, gas bill, insurance payments, cell phone bill, and water bills are not on your credit reports that your scores aren’t as high as they could be. The problem is that none of those service providers report information to the credit reporting agencies like banks, credit card issuers and credit unions report to the credit bureaus.
I would never suggest that you close an account with a lender you like just because they don’t report to all three credit bureaus. I would, however, be cognizant that the next time you want to open some sort of credit account that there’s no guarantee that it will show up on your credit reports. How do you solve this dilemma? Simple…as the lender before you apply for the account. It’s not national security to whom they report their accounts to.
Credit Reporting Expert, John Ulzheimer, is the President of Consumer Education at SmartCredit.com, the credit blogger for Mint.com, founder of www.creditexpertwitness.com and a Contributor for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. He is an expert on credit reporting, credit scoring and identity theft. Formerly of FICO, Equifax and Credit.com, John is the only recognized credit expert who actually comes from the credit industry. You can follow John on Twitter here.