Background screening is governed by a technical set of FCRA disclosure rules that employers violate through paperwork errors more often than bad intent. This hub covers those requirements and the class actions built on them.
FCRA
October 12, 2026
A tenant screening report is a consumer report, so the company that sells it carries the Fair Credit Reporting Act's accuracy, obsolescence and dispute duties, and the landlord who turns an applicant down on the strength of it owes a section 1681m notice. The CFPB's two advisory opinions on matching and public records were withdrawn in May 2025; the statute was not.
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Background Checks
October 12, 2026
Massachusetts runs criminal record checks through a state system with tiered access. An employer or landlord sees convictions only within fixed lookback windows, must collect a signed acknowledgment and check identification first, must hand the record to the applicant before asking about it, and holds the result under storage and logging rules set by regulation.
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Background Checks
October 12, 2026
The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act regulates the company that sells a rental screening report. Colorado, Washington and Oregon regulate the landlord who buys it: what the applicant can be charged, whether a report the applicant already paid for has to be accepted, how far back criminal and eviction history can reach, and what a denial letter has to say.
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FCRA
September 7, 2026
The Fair Credit Reporting Act does not have one adverse action notice. It has a notice owed before a decision that only employers owe, and a notice owed after any adverse action taken on a consumer report by anyone. The two sit in different sections, carry different contents, and answer to different silences in the statute.
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Background Checks
September 7, 2026
Four published Ninth Circuit opinions have construed a single sentence of the Fair Credit Reporting Act: the requirement that an employment background check disclosure appear in a document that consists solely of the disclosure. Read in sequence, Syed, Gilberg, Walker and Luna map what may sit on the page, what the page is, and where the line still has not been drawn.
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FCRA
September 1, 2026
The Fair Credit Reporting Act does not ask credit bureaus to be careful about who receives a consumer's file. It gives a closed list of permissible purposes and forbids everything else, on both sides of the transaction: the agency that furnishes the report and the person who obtains it.
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FCRA
August 24, 2026
The Fair Credit Reporting Act governs employment background checks through a chain of definitions that decides whether it applies at all, then through a short list of steps around the hiring decision. Most reported litigation concerns the format of one piece of paper handed to the applicant before the report is ordered.
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