We are all just over six months into Red Flags. Has anyone seen what a "notice of address discrepancy" from a CRA looks like? I've been under the assumption that a NOTICE OF ADDRESS DISCREPANCY will be displayed prominently on the credit report. We use TU and subscribe to their ID Mismatch Alert service. For address mismatches, that service displays the following message:

ID MISMATCH ALERT CURRENT INPUT ADDRESS DOES NOT MATCH FILE ADDRESS(ES).

Personally, I don't think all of the address mismatches we see on credit reports with this message meet the "substantial difference" test. So is this TU's notice of address discrepancy? What about those who don't subscribe to the service, what messages are they getting? What about other CRAs? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

We use TransUnion and that message is what we've been considering a "notice of address discrepancy". I agree though that many of reports that included that message don't seem to be substantial differences in addresses. I think the CRAs are simply trying to CYA by just reporting all address discrepancies rather than trying to determine which are substantial versus insignificant.

Agree. We see a LOT of this:

123, S. Jacob Street

123 S. Jacob St.

and they call it a discrepancy. You have to use common sense is all I can say.

So, how do you train the front line to discern between what is and what isn't, if they can't rely on the CR message? We are having them address all mismatches and its not what we want but I'm at a loss to clearly define "substantial" for the front line..

We've fought that battle too and discussed it in several training sessions...I want to think that those obvious errors are initialed and sent straight to a reviewer in our imaging department. All others are sent to our BSA (which heads up our Red Flag team)for review.

I also want to think (without hunting) that we have help dropdown boxes on our worksheet to prompt the frontline folks on what is what.

thanks. Battle rages.

We subscribe to Experian's Fraud Shield product and most of the indicators are for address discrepancies. As mentioned above, small differences in the address come up as a discrepancy. Annoying.....

WE do the same. I think I'm going to take a huge leap of faith in our people and go with eliminating "obvious errors" or something like that in our definition of the address discrepancy. We have way too many

We use Equifax to pull our credit report and it clearly says either "Address Discrepancy - No Substantial Difference Occured" or "Address Discrepancy - A Substantial Difference Occured"

It seems to distingish between typos ("Main" vs. "Mian") and similar addresses ("St." vs. "Street"). It only tells us there is a substantial difference when there really is a distinct difference in the addresses. Very helpful.

Just got off the phone with 2 NCRAs. Start with (E & E) - and this is what I was told about an actual address discrepancy. Because it's my duty to provide a "confirmed address" and apparently we've been provided means to report confirmed addresses. (according to what I've read we've been provided a method to do so.)

CRA : "That's your responsibilty to document. We don't have an actual way to report a confirmed address. Just submit whatever address you want to. And you keep proof that it's correct."

My response, "There's not a check box that I can submit to E-Oscar or a similar direct line that I can tell you that this is THE best most current address the consumer has?"

Answer from NCRA - "No. We are not changing our systems to do this."