Reply #3: My very first full time job [View All]

[dofus]

many, many years ago was for a credit bureau. This is before ANYTHING was computerized, although they were already planning ahead for computerization, and I learned any number of interesting things which are not all connected to credit or credit reports.

First of all, that's where I acquired my intense aversion towards giving a kid the exact same name as a parent. Junior or some roman numeral makes no difference, trust me on this. The best way to make sure your credit report doesn't get confused with someone else's is to do your best to make sure you don't share a name with anyone else. I don't think I ever saw a case where kid had same name as dad where their credit records didn't get confused.

The other one is what liberalhistorian said above, that you cannot take it for granted that the information on your credit record will be accurate. I can tell you that way back then, in the dark ages before computers, we probably did a much better job of keeping the credit records correct than happens now. We manually verified much of the information, and simply deleted anything more than seven years old. I'm under the impression that these days everything stays on the file forever.