A District Court judge in Mississippi has granted a defendant’s motion for summary judgement and a motion to dismiss two consolidated cases in which a debt collector was accused of violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act because it did not properly flag accounts as being disputed when furnishing information to credit reporting agencies.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Collier v. Smith, Rouchon & Associates can be accessed by clicking here.
A pair of plaintiffs each alleged that the defendant violated Section 1692e(8) of the FDCPA by making false or misleading representations when it failed to note that the plaintiffs’ had disputed their debts.
Ultimately, Judge Louis Guirola, Jr. of the District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to proceed with their lawsuits because neither of them submitted any evidence to prove that the debts were not valid. The Chief Financial Officer of the defendant submitted a declaration that, despite the debts being disputed, they were legitimately owed to the creditors and had been incurred by the plaintiffs.
“While each Plaintiff insists in her respective Complaints that she ‘disputes the alleged debts,’ neither Plaintiff articulates that the debts are invalid or how their credit ratings are otherwise inaccurate,” Judge Guirola wrote in his ruling. “Although Plaintiffs maintain statutory rights to dispute the debts under § 1692e(8), Defendant’s failure to flag the debts as disputed cannot cause a true injury where Plaintiffs have offered no summary judgment evidence that the debts were invalid, such that the resulting credit reports are inaccurate.”
