This post was made on our discussion boards last week by one of our mods, Amerikaner:

“I get an E-mail from Equifax Score Watch. There has been a change to an existing account, and my score has entered a new score band. I’m sitting at 665, so I think one of my CCS has reported the lower balance after PIFing. Nope.

“My score is now 558 - over 100 points LOWER! And the change? Those wonderful people over at SallieMae have added this to my accounts:

“Arrangements made with credit grantor to make partial payments , Student loan.”

“The thing is“, Amerikaner writes “This is completely and utterly FALSE!“.

Our hero, the always level-headed Amerikaner, called SallieMae and had an amusing conversation with an off-shore telephone operator, who knew nothing about FICO scores and obviously the scripts they had in front of them didn’t cover this information. If you want to see the (quite amusing) thread that Amerikaner wrote, go here.

Bankrate monitor first reported the problem in an article on Wednesday: Bankrate Rate Article. According to this article:

Last Thursday, May 8, Sallie Mae made an error in the way it reported some student loans to credit reporting agencies. Essentially, it reported graduated or extended repayment plans as arrangements for partial payment, causing Equifax, one of the three national credit reporting agencies, to treat them as derogatory marks. Sallie Mae spokeswoman Martha Holler says that “some of the credit monitoring services then took the interpretation one step further and labeled the derogatory mark a delinquency.”

Technically, the thousands of people who were affected could sue SallieMae for false reporting, but Sallie Mae, according to a BusinessWeek article, agreed to send out lenders to creditors and had the problem resolved with the credit bureaus in a few days.

The BusinessWeek Article.

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