How Mistakes Are Made.  Mistakes happen—and they can affect your ability to obtain credit.  When a credit report contains errors, it is often because the report is incomplete, or contains information about someone else.  This typically happens because:

• The person applied for credit under different names (Robert Jones, Bob Jones, etc.)

• Someone made a clerical error in reading or entering name or address information from a hand-written application

• The person gave an inaccurate Social Security number, or the number was misread by the lender

• Loan or credit card payments were inadvertently applied to the wrong account