Complaint Review: Merchants Credit Guide

 Debt is through Adventist Bolingbrook Hospital.  Merchants Credit Guide and a lawyer's firm were involved originally to collect on the debt.  Since I had never received a bill from the hospital, both MCG and lawyer's firm agreed to not report a collection debt to my credit report.  After 30 days, MCG reported this debt to my credit report despite my making on-time payments in the amount agreed upon.  When I contacted MCG about this, they claimed that they always have to report collection debt to credit reporting agency and that it would be removed when the debt was paid off.

After several months of making payments, I received a call from the lawyer's firm informing me that the hospital had requested that they cease all collection activity since the hospital billing department would be contacting me directly to arrange payment of the remaining debt via their billing portal.  At this point, I went to the site for hospital billing, contacted their billing department and setup an automatic debiting 12 month payment plan.  Once that was completed, I closed my bank account MCG was collecting through and opened an account with another bank.  MCG then contacted me because they weren't able to debit my old account.

I informed them that the hospital had removed authorization for MCG and the lawyer's office to collect on the debt and that payment arrangements had already been setup and first payment sent through billing portal.  I informed them that I expect them to not only cease collection activities on behalf of the hospital and that they remove the collection account they had reported to the credit reporting agencies.

Their response to this was that I had to contact the hospital billing department to remove the collection account from my report and that the hospital had to inform them that they were to cease collection activities for the debt account.  I contacted hospital billing again and they informed me that they had already sent notice to MCG to cease collection activities and that they did not have the ability to remove a collection record on my report from another agency.

I contacted MCG again and informed them of this and they again refused to remove the collection record.  At this point, I informed them that if they did not remove the incorrect record from my report that I would be getting a lawyer.  However, the agent I was speaking with hung up the line before I could say the word lawyer.

Because of the collection record still being on my report, I am not only paying higher interest rates on my credit card debt, but I was also turned down for a personal loan that would have cut my monthly interest payments down to 1/3 of what they are right now.