Banks Announce Plan to Delete Some Negative Credit Informatiom

Two top U.S. banks are preparing to delete negative credit reporting records for some borrowers who filed for bankruptcy, after facing accusations of letting poor marks for unpaid debt haunt borrowers’ credit even after the debt was canceled, the Wall Street Journal reported today. At a hearing last week, lawyers for Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced that bank officials are preparing to delete notices they sent to credit reporting agencies that a borrower’s account was “past due” and/or “charged off,” according to a court transcript viewed by the Wall Street Journal. The announcement came after the banks, along with Credit One Bank N.A., General Electric’s Synchrony Bank and Citigroup Inc., were sued by people who had filed for bankruptcy and gotten their debts canceled with a discharge order but still had notices on their credit reports that their old credit card debt had been “charged off.”