Credit Report Errors

What this area of law covers

The Fair Credit Reporting Act governs how consumer credit information is collected, maintained, and reported in the United States. Congress passed the statute in 1970 in response to a credit reporting industry that, at the time, operated almost entirely outside consumer view — gathering information of significant consequence to people’s lives, getting it wrong with regularity, and leaving the affected consumers with no meaningful way to correct the record.

The premise of the FCRA is that credit reports have become essential infrastructure for ordinary economic life — whether a person can rent an apartment, finance a car, get a job, secure insurance, or open a bank account often turns on what a credit report says about them — and that infrastructure of that consequence has to be accurate. The statute imposes specific duties on the credit reporting agencies that compile reports and on the companies that furnish information to them, and it gives consumers enforceable rights when those duties are violated.

The three nationwide credit reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — are the primary subjects of the statute, but the FCRA also reaches specialty reporting agencies (tenant screening, employment screening, check verification) and the broader ecosystem of furnishers: banks, credit card issuers, debt collectors, mortgage servicers, and other businesses that report consumer information.

What the statute requires

The FCRA imposes two categories of obligation that matter most in litigation.

The first is the obligation of credit reporting agencies to follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy of the information in their reports. Reasonable procedures is a flexible standard, but it has real content. An agency that consistently mixes one consumer’s information with another’s, that reports debts as belonging to people who never incurred them, that fails to update obviously stale information, or that ignores documented evidence of inaccuracy is generally not meeting the standard.

The second is the obligation of both reporting agencies and furnishers to investigate disputes when consumers identify errors. When a consumer disputes information on a credit report, the agency must conduct a reasonable investigation, and it must forward the dispute to the furnisher, who must conduct its own reasonable investigation. The investigations must be more than perfunctory — courts have repeatedly held that automated, formulaic responses to consumer disputes do not satisfy the statute. Where the investigation confirms the information is inaccurate, the agency must correct or delete it.

The statute also regulates who can access credit reports and for what purposes, what consumers must be told when adverse decisions are made based on credit information, and how negative information ages off reports over time.

Common ways the statute gets violated

The FCRA cases I handle generally fall into recognizable patterns.

The most common is the dispute that goes nowhere. A consumer notices an error on their credit report — a debt they never incurred, an account that was paid in full but is reported as delinquent, a tradeline belonging to someone with a similar name, a collection that resulted from identity theft — and follows the dispute procedures the FCRA requires. The reporting agency forwards the dispute to the furnisher, the furnisher confirms its own records say the same thing, and the agency reports back that the information has been verified. Nothing actually changes. The statute requires a reasonable investigation, not a confirmation that the disputed information matches the furnisher’s existing records, and the difference between the two is where many of these cases live.

A related category involves identity theft. A consumer discovers that accounts have been opened in their name by someone else and follows the procedures the FCRA establishes for identity theft, including the police report and identity theft affidavit the statute contemplates. The fraudulent accounts persist on the report anyway. These cases often involve coordinated failures by multiple actors — the reporting agency, the original creditor, and any debt collectors who have acquired the fraudulent debt — and the FCRA reaches each of them.

A category that comes up often enough to mention specifically involves unauthorized use of credit by a current or former spouse. Common patterns include accounts opened in one spouse’s name without the other’s knowledge, joint accounts that one spouse continued to use after a separation in ways the other did not authorize, and credit lines that one spouse extended or modified without the other’s consent. These cases are nuanced. The FCRA’s framework — built around the binary of authorized versus unauthorized accounts — does not always map cleanly onto the reality of intimate financial relationships, and furnishers frequently take the position that a spouse’s use was implicitly authorized regardless of what was actually agreed. Whether a particular situation supports an FCRA claim depends on facts that have to be examined carefully: when the use occurred, what the consumer knew and when, what disputes were raised once the use was discovered, and how the furnisher responded. I have handled several of these cases. The honest answer to “do I have a claim” is usually that it depends on details that can only be evaluated in conversation.

Mixed file cases involve consumers whose credit information has been combined with that of another person. The pattern is most common with consumers who share names with parents, children, or unrelated people, and the consequences can be severe: information about the other person’s debts, defaults, or identity-theft activity appears on the consumer’s report, and standard disputes often fail to untangle the mix.

Tenant screening and employment screening cases involve specialty reporting agencies that produce reports for landlords or employers. The consequences are often immediate — a denied rental application or rescinded job offer — and the FCRA imposes specific procedural requirements on these reports that are frequently violated.

What recovery looks like

The FCRA distinguishes between negligent violations and willful violations. For negligent violations, the consumer can recover actual damages — including damages for the time spent dealing with the dispute, emotional distress, denied credit, and other consequences of the inaccurate reporting — plus attorney’s fees and costs. For willful violations, the consumer can recover statutory damages of $100 to $1,000 per violation, punitive damages, actual damages, and attorney’s fees.

The willfulness standard matters because much of what credit reporting agencies and furnishers do is done deliberately as a matter of policy. When the policy itself violates the statute — when an agency has chosen, for example, to handle disputes through automated processes that cannot meaningfully investigate the underlying facts — the willfulness standard can be met even without evidence that any individual employee acted in bad faith.

The fee-shifting provision is, again, structural. Without it, individual consumers could not realistically pursue claims against companies whose business model depends on processing disputes at scale.

My experience in this area

I have represented consumers in FCRA matters throughout my career, including against all three of the nationwide reporting agencies and a wide range of furnishers — banks, credit card issuers, debt buyers, mortgage servicers, and others. The cases have included individual matters, class actions, and matters that involved coordinated misconduct by multiple defendants in the credit reporting ecosystem.

If your credit report has errors that won’t get corrected

The most useful thing you can do before reaching out is to obtain copies of your credit reports from all three nationwide agencies. The only authorized source for free reports from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion is annualcreditreport.com — the site established under federal law for this purpose. Avoid look-alike sites that advertise “free” reports and require credit card information; they are not what the statute contemplates and most charge subscription fees.

Once you have the reports, gather any documentation of disputes you have already submitted — letters, online dispute confirmations, responses you have received. The FCRA cases that result in meaningful recovery are generally cases where the consumer has already made some effort to resolve the inaccuracy through the dispute process, and the documentation of that effort is often the foundation of the eventual claim.

If the disputes have not worked, the right step is to describe the situation in detail and let me look at it. Initial consultations are free and confidential.