The Innovation Leader in Bankruptcy Software

Get Credit Reports Quickly

BkAssist partners with CIN Legal Data Solutions to let you easily download credit information into the list of liabilities for a case.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act

Section 609 of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 11 U.S.C. § 1681g, requires a Consumer Reporting Agency to disclose to a consumer all the information in the consumer's file upon request. As debtor's counsel, you will be exercising your client's rights under § 609 when you request credit data from CIN. You therefore do not need a § 604 "permissible purpose" to obtain the data.

Populating the Liabilities Screen

To obtain credit data from CIN you will first visit the Credit Reports tab of the General Settings sheet to enter the credentials CIN gives you. You need do this only once because BkAssist remembers your credentials (in encrypted form).

On the Liabilities Page for a case, you can click on the Download button to automatically obtain credit data in electronic form. BkAssist will use the tradelines to populate the list of liabilities.

You will want to have the client present when you fetch the credit data the first time in order to answer to answer the challenge questions needed to verify identity. Because BkAssist saves the downloaded data (in encrypted form) on your hard drive, you will be able to access it later without answering additional questions.

Scrubbing the Data

The major hurdle to using credit data is that the CRAs don't make any effort to use intelligible names and accurate addresses for creditors. BkAssist helps you surmount this hurdle by providing a screen that allows you to quickly (once you get the hang of it, that is) reconcile the reported names and addresses with your own database of creditor names and addresses.

Credit data also usually includes many tradelines for former debts. You can use a global setting to automatically suppress zero-dollar tradelines from the imported data.

Hooking Up

You will need to create a bankruptcy attorney account to begin accessing data from CIN. Visit CIN's web site to sign up.

A site visit is required by the major Consumer Reporting Agencies. You will pay CIN an account setup fee to defray the cost of the visit and other due diligence.