Everyone needs a little forgiveness sometimes.

And starting next year, Fair Isaac, the company behind the all-important credit score, is promising to give consumers a little bit of just that.

 Fair Isaac has been working to introduce FICO 08, a credit scoring model that's supposed to be “more forgiving of occasional slips by consumers,” according to Jane Kim of the Wall Street Journal.

For most consumers, the method will lead to slightly higher FICO scores, Tom Quinn, Fair Isaac's vice president of global scoring solutions told the Journal.

Like the traditional FICO score, the FICO 08 will issue three-digit scores ranging from 300 to 850, the higher the better. It will go easier on consumers who fall behind in payments to one account but are in good standing with several others.

Beyond that, there are a couple of changes — not all forgiving — that the credit-score obsessed need to know about.

The FICO 08 will ignore accounts on which a consumer is an authorized user. So, if your mom or dad gets you a credit card on his or her account to help you build or rebuild your own credit, it won't help.

The move is supposed to prevent people from piggybacking onto the credit histories of perfect strangers, a tactic that's gained in popularity with the growth of Web services offering to pair up the credit poor with the credit rich.

“We will do whatever it takes to protect the reliability and accuracy of FICO credit scores for lenders,” Dr. Mark Greene, CEO of Fair Isaac said in a June news release. “We will continue working with lenders, regulators and others in the credit reporting industry to end deceptive practices that fraudulently misrepresent consumer credit histories for profit.”

But not including those types of accounts also would punish people legitimately trying to build or rebuild their credit with the help of a family member or spouse.

The new scoring method also is tougher on borrowers using a higher percentage of their available credit. So, if you've got three cards with a total available credit of $6,000, having $4,000 in balances could hurt you more than it would have under the previous calculation.

Ultimately, the FICO 08 is expected to cut the credit scores of high-risk consumers and lift the scores of low-risk consumers, making it easier for lenders to bet on whom to extend credit to.

Unfortunately, it falls short of delivering the forgiveness it promises.
 
Any method that doesn't allow established credit users to assist family members or friends who are new to credit or recovering from past mistakes isn't forgiveness in my mind.