Duane Morris Class Action Review - 2023 - Report - Page 211
FCRA claims against TransUnion because the record definitively showed that
TransUnion had not distributed their potentially defamatory credit reports to third-party
creditors. Id. Thus, the Supreme Court in TransUnion announced an important
requirement in FCRA actions, that plaintiffs must at least allege that they have suffered
“injury-in-fact” that is “concrete… real, and not abstract,” in order to succeed. Id. at
2204.
II.
Key Settlements And Rulings In FCRA Class Actions
A.
Rulings Over Provision Of Accurate Reports
It is vitally important that consumer reporting agencies implement policies and
procedures that furnish accurate reports. While individual, one-off mistakes in reporting
are surely unavoidable, systemic issues in a reporting system provide the plaintiffs’
class action bar with ample evidence to argue that class certification is justified,
regardless of whether there as actual harm to many consumers. While various cases
involve the generation of consumer reports for tenant applicants, they are just as
applicable to consumer reports generated for employee applicants.
The largest FCRA class action settlement in 2022 was due to inaccurate reporting by a
consumer reporting agency. In Saylor, et al. v. RealPage, Inc., Case No. 22-CV-53
(E.D. Va. Sept. 21, 2022), the court approved a $9.73 million settlement, with individual
class member payments ranging from $315 to $800, resolving claims that the defendant
violated the FCRA by allowing incorrect sex offender registry data on tenant screening
reports. RealPage, the defendant in this case, provides tenant screening reports to
landlords and property management companies. In August 2018, the named plaintiff,
Joshua Saylor, applied for an apartment with his prospective landlord. His prospective
landlord, in turn, obtained a tenant screening report from RealPage. Unfortunately,
RealPage returned a screening report that matched Saylor’s name with another Joshua
Saylor in Indiana who was listed on the Indiana Sex offender registry. Saylor contested
the report on the basis that he had never lived in Indiana, and RealPage immediately
rectified the error. Nevertheless, in 2019 Saylor brought an FCRA class action against
RealPage, alleging that the company had erroneously generated tenant screening
reports with sex offender registry records for other tenant applicants, in violation of 15
U.S.C. § 1681e(b). RealPage’s screening software matched Saylor’s name with an
Indiana person of the same name because Indiana’s sex offender registry does not
contain the full birthdays of individuals’ names it contains. Discovery revealed that 12
jurisdictions in the U.S. do not list the full dates of birth, but instead only provide the
year of birth or the age of the person listed in their sex offender registries available to
the public. For these 12 jurisdictions, the RealPage software would match applicants by
calculating a range for the offender’s date of birth that spanned either one year (in the
event year of birth is provided) or two years (in the event age was provided). RealPage
and Plaintiffs ultimately went to mediation and agreed to settle for $9,731,570. This
figure was based on a list generated during discovery, which suggested that RealPage
incorrectly matched 11,779 applicants, between the years 2017 and 2020, with the
names of individuals on sex offender registries that did not provide full birth dates. As
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Duane Morris Class Action Review – 2023
