Credit Report Strategy Needed

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Posted by mike on November 25, 2001 at 17:44:38:

My wife has fairly decent credit ( 9 open accounts all current, no late payments, etc ) except for 2 items which are lowering her FICO score.

One item is a JC Penney card that she was co-authorized on that had some late payments in 1996-97. The account is now current and has been since 1998, but payment history has 30,60,90-day late in it from 1997. Could she improve her credit score by closing this account? We haven't used the account in over 3 years and don't really need it.

The second item is a collection agency charge-off from partially paid medical bills from 7/98. We had a medical emergency involving one of our children and insurance paid only 80% of it. The total bill was over $7K, and we had several problems with the hospital determining just what was owed and what the insurance was supposed to cover. In the end, by the time a figure had emerged which was owed and wasn't changing every month, the hospital had already submitted the account to a collection agency.

We used a certified letter to cease collection attempts and revert back to the original creditor. However, just AFTER we sent the certified letter, the collection agency reported the account opened 11/99 and reported it as R9 (charged off). In fact, this account has not been paid since 7/98 and therefore should be dated such. But the collection agency is showing it as 12/99 even though they have never received any payments from us. The certified letter was sent 8/26/2001 and accepted 8/31/2001, so it is obvious to us that the collection agency is trying to re-age the account to spite us for "firing them", because this item did not show up until 10/2001. What are our options here?

We are not interested in paying a collection agency, but are willing to settle with the hospital. However, this would be meaningless to us unless the collection agency negative entry in the credit reports is deleted. Any ideas on strategy here? My wife does not want to wait 7 years for this to fall off, but neither do we want to reward the collection agency for their irresponsible attitude. They have already lied to us several times about different payment plans they wanted us to follow.