There are two approaches you can take to resolve the debts that are present on your credit report and which are affecting your credit rating negatively. While credit agencies are the primary organizations that deal with the credit rating and credit history of a consumer, they may or may not have the necessary influence to remove the debt from your credit report. The national credit agencies the largest of which are TransUnion, Equifax and Experian merely collect and disseminate information regarding credit habits of a consumer by the means of their database.

In order to remove the debt from your credit report you can either contact the creditor himself or file a dispute with the credit agencies if you believe that the debt that is being reported is in error or can be removed from your credit file you to various reasons.

If there is a debt on your credit report that can be resolved or settled with the creditor himself, you should write a letter to the creditor asking for a settlement. You can also ask the creditor to stop reporting the debt or to report it as completely paid in exchange for the settlement amount. This is rather harder to negotiate as many creditors will not agree easy to do this. While they have the power to remove change information that’s the report to the credit bureaus, the credit reporting system works on the basis of honest and complete reporting on the part of the creditors. If the creditors started changing and manage letting the information that’s the report to the credit bureaus and the whole credit system would become pointless. However, settling and paying off a debt is better than having it reported as unpaid.

If the debt is in error or you believe that you can have it removed from your credit file due to technical reasons you can file a dispute with the credit bureau. The Fair and Accurate Transactions Act of 2003 gives every consumer the right to access his own credit report for free from each of the three national credit bureaus once every 12 months. It also gives the consumer the right to dispute any negative information on a credit reports that he believes to be inaccurate or false. You can request a copy of your debt board for free by telephone, mail or order it online by visiting the government authorized website off and your credit report.com.

Another instance in which the debt can be removed from your credit report by filing a dispute with the credit bureau is when the debt has been passed on to a collection agency. Since it is common for a debt to pass from one collection agency to another white frequently it often becomes difficult for the current debt collection agency to be able to validate the debt. Validation of a debt means that the collection agency who is trying to collect on the debt from you as provide complete and validate proof that it has the right to collect from you and that you are the owner of the debt. Since a collection account gets passed from one agency to another every few months, the current collection agency may not be able to validate the debt are providing the original paperwork from the original creditor. In this instant the credit bureau will and the collection agency will lose all right to collect the debt from you. This process however will apply to only one collection agency and if the debt passes on to another one subsequently you will have to repeat the process all over again.

Also, the three national credit agencies do not share most of the information in their database with one another. This means that are debts that is not present on your credit report with one credit bureau does not necessarily mean that it does not exist on the credit file off another credit bureau.