Charged Off + Making Payments on Same Debt

[tess_bk]

I had a high-balance credit card that had very high payments. I had to skip them a few months due to expenses related to moving my parents to assisted living. I inadvertently let it get so far behind that it went to collections. (That "ow-ow-ow" sound you hear is the sound of me kicking myself.) It was only after I'd arranged automatic withdrawals from my bank account to pay off the balance to the collection agency that I discovered that the credit card issuer is reporting the debt as charged off. Now I've always thought that if a company takes a charge-off on a debt, they report that as a loss, it goes on the borrower's credit record as a charge-off and thus a bad knock against their credit, end of story. I was very surprised to find out that this debt is considered charged off and yet I am making payments on it. (Here's the ironic part ... the payments I'm making to the collection agency are almost identical to the payments I was skipping because I couldn't afford them. The only difference is that I owed 4 of them to the credit card issuer, and they wouldn't accept anything less than the full amount due, while the collection agency graciously allowed me to make just 2 payments for the first month. Ugh.) Because I'm making payments on this account (and those payments are not reflected on my credit report) is there any way for me to challenge the charged-off status? Is it a matter of filing a credit report item dispute with Equifax and TransUnion? I've done that successfully in the past, post-bk, but not with a charge-off.