The section that protects the agency, not you

Margit's grandson owes support to a woman in Nashua, and Margit, who is seventy-three and reads everything twice, sent me a video last week with the caption "this one is for him." It was a young man at a boardroom table holding up nine sections of the credit law like cards at a magic show. The seventh card was § 1681s-1. Child support, he said. Most people have never read it.

I read it. Then I read it to Margit over the telephone, slowly, because that is the only way to read a statute to someone who has already decided what it says.

Section 1681s-1 is titled "Information on overdue support obligations." It says that a consumer reporting agency shall include in any consumer report information on the failure of the consumer to pay overdue child support, when that information is provided by a state or local child support enforcement agency, or is verified by any local, state or federal government agency. That is the whole of it. It does not give the parent who owes a right to anything. It gives the agency a place on the report that a bureau cannot refuse. Congress wrote it in 1996 to make sure arrears could not be kept off a file, and the video held it up as the law that gets them off.

I have some sympathy for the young man. The sections are real, and seven of the nine are what he says they are; Calvin has been through all nine and is fair to him. But a card held up backwards is worse than no card, because Margit's grandson would have written a letter citing § 1681s-1 to Experian, and Experian would have read it as a person quoting the section that requires the very thing he was asking them to stop.

Here is what the section leaves you, and it is not nothing.

If you are the parent who owes. The word is "verified." The bureau reports what the agency certifies. If the amount is wrong, if payments were made and not credited, if the case was closed and the arrears zeroed and the file never caught up, the dispute is with the agency first. Write to the enforcement office, by name, with the case number, and ask it to reconcile the certified amount against the payment record and correct its report to the bureaus. When it does, the bureau's dispute is a balance dispute with the agency's letter as the exhibit. When it does not, there is no letter to a bureau that helps, and the seven-year clock in § 1681c(a)(4) is the only thing that does, and it runs from the delinquency, not from the day you paid it off.

If you are the parent who is owed. The section is on your side, which is a strange thing to find in a credit statute. If the arrears are real and the agency has certified them, they will stay, and no kit, no video and no § anything moves them. Do not let anyone sell you worry about that.

If you are the grandmother. Do what Margit did after we hung up, which was to write the section number on an index card, with the word "verified" underlined, and put it in the tin with the others. A caption goes under the photograph and says what the day was. This one says: the law that puts it on, not the law that takes it off.

My daughter would tell you to send a letter. I am telling you which one not to send, and it is the one with § 1681s-1 at the top. Call the agency. Ask for the payment ledger. Compare it to the amount on the report. Then decide whether you have a dispute or a debt, and be honest about which. Do that this week, before the next video.