# Credit Report data sanitization

:::warning Automatic data sanitization
Before a Credit Report payload is sent to the credit bureau, some fields are
automatically sanitized to meet the bureau's formatting rules: disallowed
characters are removed, values are upper-cased or reformatted where required,
and anything longer than a field's maximum length is truncated. 

Your **original, unaltered values are always stored** on the applicant record;
only the copy forwarded to the bureau is sanitized. To avoid surprises, submit
data that already conforms to the rules below.
:::

## Field sanitization rules

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Field</th>
      <th>Bureau</th>
      <th>Allowed characters</th>
      <th>Max length</th>
      <th>If invalid</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td rowspan="3"><code>applicant_main.first_name, applicant_co.first_name</code></td>
      <td>Equifax</td>
      <td>All characters</td>
      <td>15</td>
      <td>Accepted as entered</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Experian</td>
      <td>letters, hyphen</td>
      <td>32</td>
      <td>other characters removed</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>TransUnion</td>
      <td>All characters</td>
      <td>20</td>
      <td>Accepted as entered and uppercased</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td rowspan="3"><code>applicant_main.last_name, applicant_co.last_name</code></td>
      <td>Equifax</td>
      <td>All characters</td>
      <td>25</td>
      <td>Accepted as entered</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Experian</td>
      <td>letters, hyphen, apostrophe</td>
      <td>32</td>
      <td>an apostrophe is kept only after <code>D</code>, <code>L</code> or <code>O</code> (e.g. <code>O'Brien</code>); other characters removed</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>TransUnion</td>
      <td>All characters</td>
      <td>32</td>
      <td>Accepted as entered and uppercased</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td rowspan="2"><code>applicant_main.middle_name, applicant_co.middle_name</code></td>
      <td>Equifax</td>
      <td>All characters</td>
      <td>15</td>
      <td>Accepted as entered</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>TransUnion</td>
      <td>All characters</td>
      <td>20</td>
      <td>Accepted as entered and uppercased</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td rowspan="2"><code>applicant_main.address, applicant_co.address</code></td>
      <td>Experian</td>
      <td>letters, numbers, space, #, period, forward slash</td>
      <td>59</td>
      <td>Commas removed</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>TransUnion</td>
      <td>All characters</td>
      <td></td>
      <td>Accepted as entered and uppercased</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Source: https://apidocs.agilitycredit.com/data-sanitization/credit-report