A District Court judge in Pennsylvania has denied a defendant’s motion to decertify a class in a Fair Credit Reporting Act case, disagreeing with the defendant that the facts of the case have changed enough to warrant decertification.
The background: The lawsuit centers on allegations that the defendant reported inaccurate bankruptcy information in consumer credit files and then failed to correct those inaccuracies after consumers submitted disputes.
- The plaintiff never filed for bankruptcy, but because an unrelated individual with a similar name filed a Chapter 13 case in Alabama, the defendant placed a bankruptcy remark on multiple tradelines in the plaintiff’s file, according to the complaint.
- After the plaintiff disputed the information, the remark was initially removed, only to reappear later and allegedly cause a denial of credit.
- The complaint asserted that this pattern reflects systemic problems with how the defendant uses Metro 2 data and conducts reinvestigations under the FCRA, harming not only the plaintiff but thousands of consumers nationwide.
- The class, certified in 2024, includes individuals whose consumer reports contained a bankruptcy remark on a tradeline but no corresponding bankruptcy record in the public-records section, and for whom no government-held bankruptcy filing existed within ten years.
The ruling: The defendant argued that expert discovery following certification revealed that the class is not ascertainable because many individuals identified by the plaintiff’s expert could potentially match to a bankruptcy record if additional identifiers such as name or address were used.
- Judge Karen S. Marston of the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania rejected that position, finding the defendant misstated its own experts’ conclusions. The experts did not determine that class members actually filed for bankruptcy; they identified only “potential” matches based on alternative attributes.
- Class membership depends on a reliable, objective process, not hypothetical possibilities or probabilistic matching, Judge Marston noted. Because the defendant offered no evidence that any class member truly had a bankruptcy filing within the defined period, there was no material change in factual circumstances that would justify decertification.
- The judge also noted that decertification is an “extreme step,” especially at this stage of the case, and found no due-process concerns.
