Date of First Delinquency

Does a creditor or collector have to enter the date of first delinquency in an entry on your credit report? If not, how can you tell when the 7 year period expires?

Len
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Hello Len,

The CRA’s don’t commonly use the terms “date of first delinquency” or “commencement of the delinquency” as can be found in FTC staff opinion letters.  To make matters even more confusing (as if we needed that), the field identifiers are not all exact matches from CRA to CRA – each CRA has some of its own field names.  If you are examining a free credit report obtained from annualcreditreport.com, then you may find language such as “this account is scheduled to continue until” and a date.  Subtract 7.5 years from that date and you should arrive at the Date of First Delinquency (DOFD).  Typically, if you subtract seven years from the “this account is scheduled to continue until” date, you will also arrive at the date the account was charged off.  Most likely, you can match that date to the ‘date closed’ (TransUnion) or ‘date of status’ (Experian) or ‘date of last activity’ (Equifax) for the charged off account. 

Collection agencies are required to report the DOFD (obtained from the original creditor) and the collection agency entry must be purged from your report at the same obsolescence date as the original creditor’s tradeline. 

A February 2003 report by Fair Isaac titled “What the CFA got right — and wrong — about credit score accuracy” stated that: “The CFA report states that one in five files has contradictory data on the date of last activity. We know this, and this is why our models only evaluate the date of last activity in rare cases.”  When scoring a collection account, the FICO model attempts to evaluate the underlying charged off account’s reporting dates as outlined above.  So maybe a collection agency’s conflicting dates don’t harm a FICO score after all?  Let me pause to ponder that…

(pause and ponder)

What am I nuts?  Get those collections off your credit report!

By the way, don’t forget to watch our free credit repair seminar.

Great questions!

Paul