A District Court judge in Florida has denied a defendant’s motion for summary judgment and granted a plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment as to liability only, in a Fair Credit Reporting Act case in which the defendant reported debts belonging to the plaintiff, when in fact they belonged to his 83-year-old father, ruling that the defendant’s policies and procedures for investigating disputes did not go far enough to satisfy the statute’s requirements.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Ramones v. Experian Information Solutions and others can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff’s father spent 18 days in a hospital’s intensive care ward back in 2017. When he was discharged, the accounts were placed with AR Resources for collection. In March 2018, the agency began reporting the unpaid debts to the credit bureaus, claiming they were owed by the plaintiff, Francisco Javier Perez Ramones, when the debts were actually owed by his father, Francisco Perez Gonzalez.
The plaintiff disputed the debts multiple times, and every time the debts were disputed, the agency allegedly conducted an investigation and verified them as accurate. The plaintiff provided his name, date of birth, the last four digits of his Social Security number, as well as mentioning in the dispute that he had never been sick, and mentioning that the debts were owed by his father. But the defendant’s policies and procedures were to not review the consumer message field when processing a dispute. The defendant did not have a date of birth in its system to compare the information in the disputes to, and argued that its investigations were reasonable as required under the FCRA.
But Judge Robert Scola of the District Court for the Southern District of Florida saw it differently. “It is not reasonable for a defendant to claim it has undertaken a reasonable investigation when it has failed to consider all of the information provided to it by a consumer,” he wrote in his ruling. “… it appears the Defendant prioritizes speed and efficiency over accuracy with respect to its investigations.”
As for the dispute investigation process itself, the bare minimum, Judge Scola noted, should be for a furnisher to review all of the information that is submitted with a dispute. “The Defendant not only reported mismatched information as verified without undertaking reasonable investigative efforts, but also admitted to not reviewing all of the information submitted by the Plaintiff with his dispute,” he wrote. “Had the Defendant reviewed the Plaintiff’s consumer message, the Defendant would have readily discovered the incorrect reporting of the Plaintiff’s father’s debts on the Plaintiff’s credit report. While the Defendant argues that certain of the actions advocated for by the Plaintiff, such as contacting the Plaintiff or its client are ‘too burdensome,’ certainly, the Defendant cannot argue that it is too burdensome to expect the Defendant to review all of the information received from a disputing consumer, including the consumer message field.”
