We have experienced some turnover in our loan servicing department and I'm hoping to assist on a matter. We received notice from a customer in October 2019 that the mailing address for his loan was incorrect. Oddly enough, the address that we boarded the loan with was never associated with the customer. No idea what happened there, but that's another issue altogether. We corrected the address immediately. In June 2019, we received a letter from the customer advising us that the incorrect mailing address is reflecting on their credit report as a prior address.

An employee in our loan servicing department contacted the credit bureau (Equifax in this case) and was told that the customer has to file a dispute directly with them. Today we received another letter from the customer saying that they have attempted to get the matter resolved with Equifax, but not getting any results. Now they are threatening us with a lawsuit.

What if anything can we do to assist the customer? Did we fail to do something in October 2019 that caused this incorrect mailing address to continue to be associated with the customer?

Once an address is reported to the credit bureau, I think it sticks and is no longer associated with any particular reporter. You could confirm with your bureau representative though.

Correct. The correct address has been reflected since we made the change, but the customer is stating that the incorrect address is showing up as a prior address in his history. He wants it removed. Since is is not something that we can correct, Equifax advised that the customer needs to deal directly with them. But he keeps coming back to us.

Seems like we did our part. Will advise our loan servicing team to contact Equifax again to assist.

I'm back to this.

Can someone explain to me why we are unable to request that this incorrect address provided to Equifax, by us, at the time the loan was made cannot be removed from their system at our direction?

I am not understanding why Equifax is telling us that only the customer can request the correction? We are responsible for the inaccurate information. Doesn't make sense to me.

I'm no expert on this stuff. But look forward to understanding this better.

If you are not currently reporting under that address, then it just goes into the "previous address" bucket and is not associated with any specific reporter is my guess. You can't request a change on information that is not associated with you any longer

Not sue why the customer is having problems going directly to Experian. That is what they tell them to do.

https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/disputing-an-incorrect-address-on-your-report/