The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has affirmed a ruling for a plaintiff in a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act case, rejecting the defendant’s arguments that the plaintiff’s medical bills did not meet the statute’s definition of a debt and that it should be entitled to the statute’s bona fide error defense because of the policies it had in place to try and prevent these types of situations.
The background: The case arose after the plaintiff, who had been injured in a car accident while working as a courier, received medical treatment at a hospital.
- Although the injuries were work-related and covered under Florida’s workers’ compensation laws, which meant the plaintiff was not personally responsible for the bills, the hospital still sent invoices directly to him. Those invoices were then forwarded to a debt collection agency, which sent two collection letters seeking payment.
- The plaintiff filed suit under the FDCPA, claiming the letters falsely represented that he owed a debt for services that should have been covered by his employer’s workers’ compensation insurance. Both parties filed motions for summary judgment, and the district court ruled in favor of the plaintiff. The defendant appealed.
The ruling: The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the lower court’s decision, rejecting both of the defendant’s key arguments.
- First, the court held that the medical bills in question were “debts” under the FDCPA. The defendant had argued that because the injury occurred on the job, the services were not rendered for personal purposes. But the court dismissed that argument as a “confus[ion]” between the work-related cause of injury and the personal nature of the medical treatment.
- Second, the court found the defendant could not rely on the FDCPA’s bona fide error defense. To qualify, a collector must show the error was unintentional, bona fide, and occurred despite procedures designed to avoid such errors.
- The defendant argued that it met the requirements because it relied on the creditor not to send work-related medical debts to it for collection, it complied with the FDCPA’s debt validation requirements in the letters it sent, and because it employed a document titled “insurance work instructions,” which appears to provide instructions for assisting patients with making insurance or workers’ compensation claims.
- “Argument and an unauthenticated work-instruction document are not evidence—and without evidence… [the defendant] cannot survive summary judgment,” the Appeals Court wrote.
- Even if the defendant had deployed the referenced procedures, the Appeals Court ruled it wouldn’t have satisfied the law’s requirements because they were either reactive (not preventative) or amounted to over-reliance on the creditor’s processes.
