The case

A consumer turns to the SCHUFA ombudsperson and lodges a complaint against the entry of an outstanding debt from a debt collection company in her SCHUFA database. In her opinion, the entry was made unlawfully because, contrary to the debt collection company's statement, she had contested the claim twice in writing before it was entered in SCHUFA. She names the dates of her letters of objection and submits a copy of them. In addition, she has neither a power of attorney nor an assignment of the claim by the original creditor and the business fee has also been claimed twice.

The debt collection company has sent her further reminders and threats, but she has not received a reply to her letter. An agreement with the creditor has therefore been unsuccessful so far, which is why she has now turned to the SCHUFA arbitration board. She asks the ombudsperson to delete the negative entry from SCHUFA's database.

The decision

The SCHUFA ombudsperson examines the available documents, the data stored by SCHUFA on the consumer and the previous correspondence with SCHUFA's Private Customer Service Center. She informs the consumer that, as the ombudsperson, she can have it checked whether the information stored at SCHUFA has been registered correctly and in accordance with the registration requirements and may continue to be stored. The ombudsperson also arranges for an enquiry to be made with the debt collection agency to check whether all the necessary reporting requirements were met when the information was reported to SCHUFA. The following conditions, among others, apply to payment defaults (outstanding claims): They may only be reported to SCHUFA if consumers have previously been sent two reminders, the first reminder was sent at least four weeks ago at the time of reporting to SCHUFA, the claim is undisputed and consumers have also been informed of the possibility of data transfer to SCHUFA.

Examination of the case file shows that the consumer's objection was made at the same time as the reminders were sent by the debt collection company, i.e. before the entry was entered in the SCHUFA database. As the claim was therefore disputed, the reporting requirements were not fully met and the ombudsperson decided to arrange for the entry to be deleted from the SCHUFA database.