A District Court judge in Texas granted summary judgment to a credit reporting agency, dismissing a consumer’s Fair Credit Reporting Act lawsuit over accounts and inquiries he claimed were inaccurate or unauthorized.
The background: The case arose after the plaintiff reviewed his consumer report and set out to challenge what he saw on it.
- After obtaining a copy of his report in January 2025, the plaintiff said it contained inaccurate, incomplete, and unverifiable information furnished to the defendant.
- He disputed the accuracy of three accounts in a written dispute letter, including an auto loan he said was wrongly showing a charged-off balance of $129,923 and two accounts with allegedly incorrect late-payment histories. Two of the accounts were with one lender and the third with another.
- He separately claimed that four hard inquiries on his report were ones he never authorized.
- The plaintiff then sued under the FCRA, seeking actual, statutory, and punitive damages and alleging the defendant failed to provide a full file disclosure, failed to follow reasonable procedures to ensure accuracy, and failed to properly reinvestigate his dispute.
The ruling: Judge Amos L. Mazzant of the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas granted the defendant’s motion for summary judgment and dismissed all of the plaintiff’s claims with prejudice.
- On the file-disclosure claim, the judge found the plaintiff never actually asked for his full file. The plaintiff argued the request was “literally implied” in his dispute letter, but he offered no authority that an implied request is enough, so the claim failed.
- On the accuracy and reinvestigation claims, Judge Mazzant held the plaintiff first had to show the reported information was actually inaccurate, and he produced nothing beyond his own deposition testimony, no proof of timely payments or correct balances.
- The judge agreed the plaintiff’s real grievances were legal disputes with his lenders, not verifiable reporting errors. He had threatened to sue one lender and claimed another had not honored a forbearance agreement. As the judge put it, “The paradigmatic example of a legal dispute is when a consumer argues that although his debt exists and is reported in the right amount, it is invalid due to a violation of law.”
- Because credit reporting agencies cannot adjudicate legal disputes, the judge wrote that courts “have been loath to allow consumers to mount collateral attacks on the legal validity of their debts in the guise of FCRA reinvestigation claims.”
- The four disputed inquiries were irrelevant, the judge noted, because the plaintiff never pleaded the section of the statute that governs unauthorized access.
