A District Court judge in Florida has granted a plaintiff’s motion for partial summary judgment on liability in a Fair Credit Reporting Act case, ruling that a furnisher provided inaccurate information when it verified a delinquency history that a credit reporting agency had scrambled on its own.
The background: The dispute traces back to a mortgage that the plaintiff paid off years ago, and to a reporting error that nobody at the defendant could explain.
- The loan was serviced by a corporate affiliate of the defendant, which handled all credit reporting. The court noted the naming mix-up in the complaint but found the distinction immaterial.
- The plaintiff fell behind on installment payments, and delinquencies were reported for a stretch running from late 2019 into early 2020. The loan was paid off that spring, and monthly reporting stopped.
- Over the next few years, the plaintiff disputed the reporting repeatedly across all three national credit bureaus. Each time, the servicer confirmed the loan was paid in full.
- Two years ago, one bureau began sliding the delinquency sequence forward on its own, first to January through July 2023, then to November 2023 through May 2024, then back again. The servicer never learned why.
- Around the same time, the plaintiff was denied a rental application after a tenant screening report showed the shifted late payments, and was later denied a credit card. That same screening report also listed 84 other delinquencies of 90 days or more, an account in collections, and two charged-off credit cards.
- The plaintiff sued, alleging the defendant failed to conduct a reasonable investigation after being notified of the disputes.
The ruling: Judge William F. Jung of the District Court for the Middle District of Florida granted the plaintiff summary judgment on liability while handing the defendant a win on the willfulness question.
- Judge Jung rejected the argument that an automated dispute response can never qualify as information provided to a bureau. When a furnisher verifies, corrects, or updates account information in response to a dispute, he wrote, it is communicating information the agency may continue to rely on.
- The defendant pointed out that no federal court had ever held an ACDV response to be furnishing. The judge said the absence of on-point authority did not stop him from reaching the conclusion in circumstances where the inaccuracy started with an alleged glitch in the bureau’s own system.
- On reasonableness, the judge found the answer was sitting in the file. The servicer had its payoff records, the bureau’s dispute listing the wrong dates, and its own earlier verification.
- Instead, the correction field on the first response was left blank, and the second response fed the same wrong sequence back. The defendant, Judge Jung wrote, appears to have “rubber stamped” the disputes as “accurate as date reported.”
- The defendant’s own corporate representative did not help. Asked whether the reporting should have been fixed, he testified: “100 percent, yes, they should have.” The failure, he said, was an “oversight.”
- That admission cut both ways. Judge Jung found no evidence of knowing or reckless conduct, so the willfulness claim was dismissed and the case heads to trial on actual damages only.
