Credit File Corrections is a service of Madgett Law, LLC, a Minnesota law firm. Reading this site, downloading a template, or using the letter builder is general information about federal credit-reporting law — it is not legal advice about your situation and does not create an attorney-client relationship. This is attorney advertising.

Editorial standards

Who writes this, how each legal statement gets verified before it is published, and what happens when something here turns out to be wrong.

Who publishes and who writes

Credit File Corrections is a service of Madgett Law, LLC, a Minnesota law firm. David J.S. Madgett, Minnesota Bar No. 390494, writes the articles and guides, is responsible for the content of this site, and is licensed to practice in Minnesota only. No part of this site is written by anyone else, bought from a content vendor, or generated and published without a lawyer reading it.

Madgett Law, LLC · IDS Center, 80 South 8th Street, Suite 1650, Minneapolis, MN 55402 · 612-470-6529 · [email protected].

Credit File Corrections is not a credit bureau or consumer reporting agency and is not affiliated with any consumer reporting agency, furnisher, or credit monitoring company. It is not a government agency, a public legal aid organization, a nonprofit, or a lawyer referral service.

The rule everything else follows from

No statement of law is written from memory. Every statutory proposition on this site is checked against the primary source — the United States Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, the Minnesota Statutes, or the agency's own publication — before it is written down, not after. The source is linked on the page that carries the statement, and the date it was checked is printed next to it.

That sounds obvious and it is not what most credit content does. A great deal of what is published about credit reporting describes rules that were amended years ago, quotes a statute that says something adjacent to what is claimed, or repeats a number that entered circulation from a blog post and has never been checked against anything. Dating the check is what makes the claim falsifiable: if you read a page here two years from now, you can see exactly how old its verification is and go look for yourself.

What that looks like in practice

  1. Sources first, prose second

    The statute is retrieved and read before the paragraph explaining it exists. Where the exact words matter, they are quoted verbatim in a block quotation so you can always tell our words from the statute's — and so a paraphrase cannot quietly drift into a claim the text does not support.

  2. Every article carries its sources and its date

    Each article ends with the list of sources it rests on and the date they were last retrieved. An article without at least one source does not build; that is enforced by the publishing pipeline rather than remembered.

  3. Statistics are dated in the sentence that uses them

    A figure from a 2012 market study is described as a 2012 figure. Where a later official report contradicts an earlier one, the later one governs and the article says so rather than quietly picking the more interesting number.

  4. What the law entitles you to, and what companies choose to offer, stay separate

    One example that recurs: federal law entitles you to one free report per twelve months from each nationwide agency. The weekly reports are a voluntary practice the bureaus adopted and the CFPB describes — real, useful, and revocable. This site never collapses those two into "the law gives you free weekly reports," because one of them can be taken away and the other cannot.

  5. Citation checking before publication, separately from writing

    Legal citations are verified independently of the drafting — that the authority exists, that it says what it is cited for, and that any quotation is verbatim. Checking that a case exists is not the same as checking that it holds what a sentence claims, and the second failure is the one that matters.

Currency

This site currently carries 48 articles. Their sources were last verified between August 4, 2026 and August 7, 2026. Statutory statements are re-verified on a rolling basis, and any page whose verification has gone stale is either re-checked or marked.

Law changes and this site does not always change the same day. That is the reason for the dates rather than an excuse for them: a page that tells you when it was last checked lets you decide how much weight to put on it, which a page with no date does not.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed. Use support and say which page and which sentence.

Nothing on this site is quietly deleted to make a past statement disappear. If a page was wrong, the record of it having been wrong is worth more than a tidy archive.

What this site will not publish

Notice version 2026-09-10.1 · See also who publishes this, the disclaimer, and the terms of use.

Build a letter