How to Remove Capital Management Services from Your Credit Report
Has Capital Management Services (CMS) contacted you claiming that you owe it a debt?
If you have received calls and letters from a debt collection agency such as CMS, there will probably already be an entry on your credit history that has negatively impacted your score.
Although a collections entry can affect your credit for seven years, there are a few simple strategies you can use to have the entry deleted.
What is Capital Management Services?
Are you concerned about CMS’s legitimacy? Though you might not have heard of the company before, Capital Management Services, LP, is an established debt collections agency. Its website explains that it provides excellent delinquent receivables resolutions and establishes that it is a legitimate company.
The medium-sized agency originated in Buffalo, New York, in 2000, and its headquarters are still there today.
CMS typically collects on the behalf of student loan companies and big bank credit cards, such as:
- Discover
- CitiBank
- Capital One
Steps for removing Capital Management Services from your credit report
While the entry made by CMS may have damaged your credit score, it doesn’t have to stay in your report. With a few simple strategies, you can get the debt collections agency removed from your credit report:
- Ask for proof
- Pay to have the entry deleted
- Leave it to the pros
1. Ask for proof of the debt
Mistakes do happen. CMS could be contacting you about a debt you’ve already paid or one that actually belongs to someone else. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) requires collections agencies to provide documentation verifying your debt before they collect payment.
If you’re unsure of whether you owe the debt, you should mail in a debt validation letter to ask for proof. After CMS’s initial contact, you have 30 days to ask the company to validate your debt.
Pro tip: Send a validation letter even if you’re aware of your debt to CMS. Sometimes, the necessary documentation from your original lender or service provider is missing, and an agency needs this to justify collecting payments.
When a collections agency can’t validate a debt, it has to stop its efforts. You shouldn’t receive any more calls or letters, and the agency should remove its entry from your credit report.
This is the fastest (and cheapest) way to get a collections account off your report.
2. Pay to have the entry deleted
While you should certainly try submitting a debt validation letter, success with this isn’t your only option.
If you weren’t able to send a letter within the 30-day period or the agency had the necessary proof, you can try to negotiate a smaller payment. You can negotiate a pay-for-delete agreement in which you pay part of the debt in exchange for the deletion of the credit entry.
When you start discussing a pay-for-delete agreement, start your payment offer at 50% of what you owe. It’s essential that you get this agreement in writing. If you pay what you owe without a written agreement, the agency will stop calling, but the entry will remain on your credit report.
After you make your payment and the collections agency promptly removes the entry as agreed, your credit score should quickly improve.
3. Let a professional credit repair company handle it
While you could get CMS off your credit report with a debt validation letter or a pay-for-delete agreement, you don’t necessarily have to do it yourself. If you’d rather not communicate with CMS on your own, you can find a credit repair company to do it for you.
Credit repair companies help people dispute claims and negotiate payments and entry removals with creditors. They can also help if a debt collector violates the FDCPA. If you have a complicated or tricky situation, such as bankruptcy or other legal issues, credit repair companies can help.
To find the right credit repair company for your needs, look at our list of the best credit repair companies and start working to improve your score today.
How does Capital Management Services work?
CMS is a third-party debt collector that makes a profit by collecting unpaid consumer debts for lenders, creditors or service providers.
If you forget to make a payment and the company you owe is unable to collect, it turns to agencies like CMS. It can sell your debt to the debt collector or pay for its assistance collecting it from you. This gives the agency the right to call and mail letters to you until you make a payment.
It will also make a collections entry on your credit report that negatively impacts your payment history. Your payment history accounts for 35% of your overall credit score.
Collections entries remain on your report for seven years, even after you pay the debt. The severity of the damage to your score depends on several factors, such as the amount of debt you have and the length of time it takes you to pay.
It’s incredibly important that you follow the proper steps to get CMS to stop contacting you and to remove the entry from your credit report.
Dealing with Capital Management Services
CMS’s website stresses the company’s strict adherence to FDCPA guidelines. The FDCPA protects you from unlawful harassment and debt collection practices.
Like many debt collection agencies, CMS isn’t free from complaints. You can look at CMS’s Better Business Bureau (BBB) profile and search through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) database to find complaints.
Most debt collectors receive complaints about the following issues:
- Harassment: Debt collectors can’t call you at work or at inappropriate hours, and they can’t contact your employer, family or friends about your debts.
- Faulty credit reporting: Sometimes, faulty reporting can result in an incorrect collections entry, which is why debt collectors must validate debts on request.
- Failure to validate debts: The FDCPA requires collections agencies to present proof of your debt upon request, which they sometimes fail to do.
Another considerable advantage of the FDCPA is that it allows you to define the terms of your communications with the agency. It’s important that you communicate with debt collectors through mail rather than over the phone. That way you have everything in writing if there are any issues getting the agency to remove its collections entry from your report.
Capital Management Services contact information
Here is the contact information for CMS:
Mailing address:
698 1/2 S. Ogden Street
Buffalo, NY 14206
Phone number: 716-871-9050
Website: cms-collect.com
Capital Management Services Rating
BBB awarded CMS an A, but consumers have filed 19 complaints against it over the past three years. The CFPB lists 34 complaints in 2021, mainly for refusing debt validation or inaccurate reporting.
In summary
While the U.S. struggles with the consequences of a global pandemic and the resulting financial crisis, it’s understandable that you may have misplaced some bills or can’t afford to pay them. If you are faced with paying your rent or a medical bill, you have a very difficult situation to manage.
After several attempts to collect the amount you owe, the original creditor, whether it is a credit card issuer, student loan company or medical provider, will either hire a third-party debt collection agency or sell your debt for a substantially reduced sum.
Once a debt collection agency (in this case, CMS) has control of your account, it will create a delinquent entry on your report that seriously damages your credit score and history. If you’ve received phone calls and letters from an agency like CMS, it can be incredibly frustrating, but there is hope.
Review the helpful tips in this article and understand there are ways you can successfully navigate the situation and repair your credit score.
Update: This article has been updated to reflect the number of current BBB and CFPB complaints against CMS and to provide CMS’s current BBB rating.
Disclaimer: This story was originally published on September 21, 2020, on BetterCreditBlog.org. To find the most relevant information concerning collections or credit card inquiries, please visit: https://money.com/how-to-remove-collections-from-credit-report/ or https://money.com/get-items-removed-from-credit-report/