Dennis v. BEH-1, LLC, 2007 WL 2769650 (9th Cir. Sept. 25, 2007)

Basically, the defendant, Dennis, had Experian report that a judgment had been entered against him, when in fact, although a complaint had been filed, the judgment was dismissed. The defendant had submitted documents proving this, and also requested that the credit bureaus check out the court documents themselves. Apparently, they asked their court records information source (Hogan Information Systems) to also check. Hogan found a copy of the same document that was submitted by the defendant. Despite all this, Experian refused to correct the entry. At first, the defendant lost the case, but appealed to the 9th district court. He then won.

Excerpts from the 9th district court’s opinion….

When conducting a reinvestigation pursuant to 15 U.S.C. § 1681i, a credit reporting agency must exercise reasonable diligence in examining the court file to determine whether an adverse judgment has, in fact, been entered against the consumer. A reinvestigation that overlooks documents in the court file expressly stating that no adverse judgment was entered falls far short of this standard.

This case illustrates how important it is for Experian, a company that traffics in the reputations of ordinary people, to train its employees to understand the legal significance of the documents they rely on.

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