Data Furnishers: Who Reports Your Debts to the Credit Bureaus

The Fair Credit Reporting Act gives furnishers their own set of duties, separate from the duties it places on the credit bureaus. A furnisher may not report information it knows is inaccurate, and once you dispute an item, the furnisher must conduct a reasonable investigation of what you actually told the bureau instead of simply re-confirming the balance already sitting in its own system. A furnisher that keeps reporting the same wrong balance, the same wrong payment history, or an account that was never yours can be sued for it.

Furnishers are not the same thing as consumer reporting agencies. The agency compiles and sells the file; the furnisher supplies the raw data that goes into it. Both can be liable, and in many cases both are named.