Fair Credit Reporting Act developments: consumer reporting agency duties, background check litigation, adverse action notices and CFPB activity.
The FCRA reaches far beyond credit bureaus, covering background screeners, tenant reports, and employment checks. This hub follows CFPB activity, the persistent stream of adverse-action and accuracy litigation, and what each ruling means for employers who screen applicants.
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.
Read more →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.
Read more →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.
Read more →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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