Newlyweds say they're shut out of buying a house after credit report mix-up

Jessica Rochon from Ottawa says she has always been good with her money, so she was floored to find out she and her wife had been denied a mortgage pre-approval because of someone else's bad credit — a woman who lives a province away in Quebec with almost the same name.

The two Rochons are not related and have never met, but their Equifax credit history appears to have been mixed into one file, causing financial problems — and a lot of headaches — for the Ottawa Rochon. 

She says her pristine credit score plummeted and there was a collection added to her file at some point that isn't clear from the report. She found out at the worst time: when she and her wife were looking to buy their first home together last August.

"I thought, this can't be real. I had never been late for a payment or definitely not let something go to collections," Rochon told Go Public. "I was so surprised this could happen. I've been so careful."

By the time Rochon contacted Go Public, she'd been fighting for five months to get Equifax to correct the record, having to explain the situation over and over again to different Equifax agents but getting nowhere.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. [It was] incredibly frustrating. Equifax told me it would take five to 20 business days to correct errors," Rochon said.

Rochon is one of dozens of people contacting Go Public, who say the country's two major credit bureaus Equifax and TransUnion — both private companies — are failing to deal with errors on credit reports, leading to serious problems for some.

"There are just so many credit inaccuracies … and some provinces don't even have a time period in which credit bureaus have to respond. So, in our experience, they often don't," said John Lawford, executive director for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, a consumer rights group.

The financial consequences can be significant, says Lawford, who's seen people lose out on mortgages or loans when they need them the most.

When Rochon first reached out to Equifax in August to try to get the issue resolved, she says she thought it wouldn't be difficult since the company had a web page dedicated to her specific kind of problem "which just goes to show that it's a lot more common than we think," she said.

But she says her efforts to dispute the information were met with resistance; often waiting on hold only to be told Equifax's system was down or that a supervisor wasn't available when she asked to speak with one.

Even when she did, she says nothing came of it. "It was almost laughable at this point because it's so ridiculous."

The couple eventually found another mortgage broker who was able to convince the lender to only consider Rochon's TransUnion credit history and ignore the Equifax one.

But by that time, it was too late. Prices for detached homes in Ottawa had increased from an average of $674,449 in August to $771,739 in January: a 14 per cent jump, according to the Ottawa Real Estate Board.