As previously reported, bills were introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 7297) and U.S. Senate (S. 3502) to amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to curtail the practice of trigger leads with mortgage loans. Recently, a diverse group sent a letter to the Chairs and Ranking Members of the House Committee on Financial Services and the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs expressing support for the bills.… Continue Reading

As previously reported, in 2023 bills were introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 4198) and the U.S. Senate (S. 3502) to amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to curtail the practice of trigger leads with mortgage loans. While the goals of the bills are the same, the language of the bills differ.… Continue Reading

On January 11, 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued two new advisory opinions: Fair Credit Reporting; Background Screening and Fair Credit Reporting; File Disclosure. The advisory opinions are part of the CFPB’s ongoing efforts to clean up what the CFPB describes in its press release as allegedly “sloppy” credit reporting practices and ensure credit report accuracy and transparency to consumers.… Continue Reading

Colorado and New York are not waiting for the Fair Credit Reporting Act rulemaking to eliminate creditor use of medical debt announced by the CFPB in September 2023. As we previously blogged, in the past two years, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion have made significant changes with respect to medical debt collections by removing unpaid medical collections under $500 from consumer credit reports, removing paid medical collections from credit reports, and extending the time period before unpaid medical debt appears on a credit report to one year after the first delinquency.… Continue Reading

The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) on September 11, 2023, settled a claim against a group of affiliated entities operating a background reporting business, Instant Checkmate, LLC, TruthFinder, LLC, The Control Group Media Company, LLC, Intelicare Direct, LLC, and PubRec LLC (“background report companies” or “companies”) for alleged misrepresentations that deceived consumers about whether they had criminal records and for operating as a consumer reporting agency without following the requirements of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”).… Continue Reading

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Henderson v. Source For Pub. Data, L.P., No. 21-1678, 2022 U.S. App. LEXIS 30534 (4th Cir. Nov. 3, 2022) found that the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act did not extend to a public data aggregation company.  The ruling reversed the district court’s order dismissing all claims in a putative class action alleging Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”) violations against the data aggregator, PublicData.com… Continue Reading

Recently, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced the approval of two new credit scoring models, the FICO 10T and the VantageScore 4.0 for use by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs or Enterprises). Lenders will have a few years to implement use of the new models before being expected to report both scores on loans sold to the GSEs.… Continue Reading

The CFPB recently issued an advisory opinion to consumer reporting companies about their obligation to prevent obviously false “junk data” from appearing on consumers’ credit reports.  The opinion states that companies must take steps to reliably detect and remove logically inconsistent data from consumers’ credit reports such as information that is obviously impossible.… Continue Reading