The one page of the tri-merge to read first

Read the personal-information block before the scores. It takes forty seconds and it's where the file tells you whether the rest of it is about your buyer.

Two hundred files a week, and the ones that go sideways at underwriting almost always announced it on page one: an alias that isn't a nickname, an address in a state the buyer has never lived in, an employer they can't place. Those aren't typos. They're the wire another person's accounts travel down, and § 1681e(b) is the section that says the bureau was supposed to have procedures against exactly that.

Three things to check, in order.

Names. The buyer's name as it appears on the ID, plus any real variant (maiden name, a dropped middle initial). Anything else, a different first name, a spouse's name listed as an alias, is a flag. Ask, don't assume.

Addresses. Every one should be a place the buyer lived or received mail. An address they can't place is either a matching error or someone else's history, and either way it gets a one-item letter before the application goes in, not after.

Employers. A company the buyer has never worked for is the same flag; it also becomes a question on the 1003 you don't want asked twice.

Then look at the score. Not before.

My mother read the masthead of a newspaper before the front page, every morning, to see who was responsible for what she was about to read. Same habit.

What to tell the buyer: "There's a name on your Experian file that isn't yours. Before we do anything else, it comes off, with one letter and a copy of your license. Two weeks." What not to do: submit around it. DU reads what's there, and the underwriter who finds the alias later will assume you didn't look.

If page one is clean, the tradelines are a normal read. If it isn't, nothing after it is reliable until it is.

The buyer with the wrong name on page one usually has an account to go with it three pages later. Eight files, personal information read first on every one: send them here.