The updated Credit Amnesty allows consumers who are listed on the credit bureaus with relevant negative information to have this information removed from the records of the credit bureaus, as from the 1st of April 2014 and completely removed by the 1st June 2014, in accordance with Regulation 2 (b).
Regulation 2 (b): A registered credit bureau must remove detrimental consumer credit information and information relating to unpaid judgements as considered in Regulation 2 (a) with a period of two (2) months from the effective date of these regulations.
There are two parts to the credit amnesty information removal process:
- Once-off removal
- On-going removal of information.
Once-off removal
This removes all detrimental information (whether paid or unpaid), including:
- Negative allocations of consumer behaviours such as ‘default’, ‘delinquent’ or ‘slow paying’,
- Negative allocations of prosecution action, including allocations such as ‘legal action’ or ‘write-off’,
- Negative status codes as shown on consumer payment profiles,
- Elimination of paid-up civil court judgements where the consumer has settled the capital amount.
On-going removal requirements
This is the on-going removal of all paid up judgements, as per the credit amnesty regulations, and paid up adverse information listings as per the National Credit Amendment Bill, which has not been promoted yet.
Consumers are not off the hook when it comes to their credit obligations. This credit amnesty is being put into place to remove certain negative records from the credit bureaus records, in regards to the way that they were previously managed.
Please contact us if you have any queries regarding the credit amnesty update.
