Consumer complaint received 2022-03-23
Company: DISCOVER BANK
State: VA
Product: Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports
Sub-product: Credit reporting
Issue: Problem with a credit reporting company's investigation into an existing problem
Sub-issue: Their investigation did not fix an error on your report

Complaint:
On XX/XX/XXXX, my wife received a phone call from a Discover Card representative who called from the collections department regarding a past due balance. During that conversation, the agent and I discussed the amount due, when the payment needed to be paid, and options for payment. 
The representative advised that she could set up installment payments because the amount due was larger than our normal payment and she told her that she was reluctant to go with an installment payment plan because she was worried that doing so would not keep the account in good status and that she was concerned that it would report late to the Credit Bureaus. She advised that because the installment payments would be set up to cover the full amount due, it would not report to the Credit Bureaus. That is the only reason she agreed to the installment plan. Sometime after the installment plan was set up and payments had already started drafting my bank 2 cover the installments that were being withdrawn, I received an alert in my email from one of the credit bureaus and it turned out to be an alert showing that Discover had reported the account being reported 30 days late. That is when we knew we were given the wrong information by the representative the day she called to set up a payment. We knew that all calls were recorded so we did not think that we would still be dealing with this situation and trying to resolve a problem that could easily be resolved if discover would just listen to the recorded call. 
I previously reported this issue to the CFPB, reference case number XXXX XXXX as a complaint regarding incorrect information being reported to the Credit Bureaus XXXX I am now reporting this as the complaint not being properly investigated. In all of my contacts including my initial contact with Discover I requested to have the phone call that was recorded reviewed and each time I was told that it would but in a letter dated XX/XX/XXXX from XXXX XXXX, The Executive Office of Consumer Advocacy XXXX advises In reviewing this matter we were unable to retrieve the call information to confirm what information was provided by our agent in the XX/XX/XXXX telephone call. 
I have no control over Discover 's inability to maintain recorded phone calls therefore not being able to retrieve the recorded call is not an adequate excuse to validate the reporting of the account as late to the credit bureaus. We have made numerous phone calls, we have reported my dispute to the credit bureaus directly, we have emailed the executive offices and we have emailed executives directly ( although the direct emails to executives were intercepted by XXXX XXXX and never reviewed by the actual executives the emails were addressed to ) and to no avail, the situation continues to be discarded as if payment was intentionally made late by accepting the offer to set up installment payments when that is not the case at all. We would not have agreed to installment payments if we had known we could not trust the information we wer given. We paid the full amount due that same day. I followed through with paying all of the installment payments with no issues.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation