If your loan was serviced by Specialized Loan Servicing and the statements now arrive under a different name, the first thing worth knowing is that this is a servicing question, not a loan question. The balance, the rate and the terms do not change. What changes is which company takes the payment and reports the account to the credit bureaus each month — and that is where errors get made.
What SLS is, and what happens when servicing moves
Specialized Loan Servicing, usually written SLS, is a mortgage servicer. A servicer is generally not the owner of the loan; it is the company paid to administer it — taking payments, running escrow, answering the phone, and reporting the account to Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
Servicing rights are bought, sold and consolidated, and they move without the borrower agreeing to it. That is ordinary and by itself is no sign that anything has gone wrong. The narrower question is whether the account survived the move intact.
If you are trying to work out whether SLS and the company now billing you are the same operation, that is a reasonable question to ask — and for credit reporting purposes the answer you actually need is narrower: which company reported the entry on your file, and is the same debt now being reported once or twice?
Why a consolidation is the highest-risk kind of transfer
An ordinary transfer moves a loan from one system to another. A consolidation moves whole portfolios, and it does it while both companies are still reporting. The errors have a recognizable shape:
- Both names reporting the same mortgage at once, so one debt appears on the file as two open accounts.
- Payments made to the old servicer that never arrive at the new one, reported as missed months.
- Payment history that did not carry across, so years of on-time months disappear and the account looks new.
- The transfer date recorded wrongly, opening a gap that reads as non-payment.
- Escrow shortfalls treated as delinquency, so a disagreement about taxes or insurance becomes a late payment.
- A balance a loan modification changed, still reported at the pre-modification figure.
- A loan discharged in bankruptcy still reported as owing, or carrying a balance after discharge.
The duplicate tradeline is the one to look for first. A mortgage is usually the largest account on a credit file; reported twice, it can look like twice the debt, and an underwriter reading it has no way to know which entry is real.
Check the transfer window, month by month
Pull all three reports and line up the months either side of the date servicing changed. Check the open dates, the balances, the account numbers and the name each entry is reported under. An account reported correctly at one bureau and wrongly at the other two is itself evidence about the investigation.
Keep the transfer notice. It establishes the date, which is what turns a vague complaint into a dated, provable discrepancy.
Who is answerable
Any company that reports information about you to the credit bureaus is a furnisher under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and those duties are not discretionary. After a transfer the reporting may come from the old servicer, the new one, or both, which is why the identity of the furnisher is established at the start of a case rather than assumed.
When you dispute an item with a credit bureau, the bureau must conduct a reasonable reinvestigation, and the furnisher must investigate, review what the bureau sends it, and report back. If the information is inaccurate or incomplete, it has to be corrected with every bureau it was reported to.
Whether that happened is recorded in the companies’ own systems — the dispute file, the automated codes passed between bureau and furnisher, and the record of what a human being reviewed, if anyone did. Those records come out in a case and nowhere else. A dispute is answered by whatever a company chooses to tell you; litigation is answered by what it has to produce.
Dispute with the bureaus, not only the servicer
Telling a servicer it has made a mistake is sensible and worth doing, but the furnisher’s investigation duty is triggered by a dispute filed with a credit bureau. A complaint made only to the company can leave the strongest part of a claim unavailable. Where two companies are involved, dispute the entry itself rather than trying to work out in advance which one to blame.
Send the dispute to Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, in writing, with the documents proving the entry is wrong, and keep proof of when you sent it.
What the statute allows
For a negligent violation, a consumer may recover any actual damages sustained as a result of the failure, together with the costs of the action and reasonable attorney’s fees as determined by the court.
For a willful violation, a consumer may recover actual damages or statutory damages of not less than $100 and not more than $1,000, plus such punitive damages as the court may allow, and again costs and reasonable attorney’s fees.
On a mortgage the actual damages are usually concrete: a refinance declined or priced higher, a home equity line refused, an application on a second property denied, and the months spent trying to correct something that would not be corrected.
The deadline
An action must be brought no later than two years after you discover the violation, or five years after the violation occurred, whichever comes first. Servicing transfers and dispute cycles both run in months, so write down the date you first saw the error.
What to send us
- The transfer notice, and the date servicing changed
- Your mortgage statements from either side of that date
- Your credit report from each bureau, showing how the account is reported and under whose name
- Proof of the payments in question — bank records, confirmations, canceled checks
- The modification agreement, discharge order or payoff letter, if one applies
- The dispute you filed, to which bureau, and proof of when
- Every response, including any letter saying the item was verified
What it costs
The fee provision is written into the Act: in a successful action the costs and reasonable attorney’s fees are recoverable from the defendant, as determined by the court. That is why this work is handled on a contingency basis rather than billed by the hour.
You pay nothing unless we win.
Where your situation fits
If the name now on your statements is Shellpoint, see our page on Shellpoint Mortgage Servicing and your credit report. For other transfers, see Select Portfolio Servicing. If a subservicer is administering the loan for the bank that owns it, see Cenlar. If the bureau is the one refusing to correct the entry, see the credit bureau lawyer page. If you are still at the dispute stage, start with credit report dispute lawyer. Where a dispute has already failed, the FCRA lawsuit page sets out who can be sued. Our directory of mortgage servicers lists contact details for the major companies.
Have your report reviewed
The Kim Law Firm represents consumers in Fair Credit Reporting Act cases against mortgage servicers, the credit bureaus, the specialty reporting agencies, and the companies that furnish information to them. Send us the transfer notice and your reports and we will tell you whether we see a claim.
Contact us to have your credit report reviewed.
Admitted in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; available to appear pro hac vice in other federal courts.
This page is about credit reporting accuracy. The Kim Law Firm is not affiliated with Specialized Loan Servicing LLC, and this page is not a complaint about that company. It describes how mortgage servicing transfers can produce credit reporting errors and what the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires when they do.