Sherri Cohen v. Equifax Information Services, LLC, et al.

Having accurate credit is vital to modern Americans. Without credit, you can’t get loans or credit cards, rent apartments or cars, get some jobs, get insurance or any number of other necessities. A 2012 study by the Federal Trade Commission says that 200 million American consumers have credit files with the Credit Reporting Agencies (CRAs) like the Respondents Equifax and TransUnion.1 But the FTC also found that 26% of those reports had errors with 13% having significant enough errors to change credit scores. To protect consumers and creditors and the economy from erroneous credit reports, Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 U.S.C. §1681 et seq. (“FCRA”) to require CRAs like the Defendants to act as credit watchdogs. The FCRA requires them to “adopt reasonable procedures” to monitor consumer credit and to do so “in a manner which is fair and equitable to the consumer.” At the heart of this law is a provision which lets consumers dispute inaccurate information in their credit reports and requires CRAs like Equifax and TransUnion to “conduct a reasonable investigation” of those disputes and fix the errors found. 15 U.S.C. §1681i(a). When the CRAs like Equifax and TransUnion fail to do that, the FCRA lets consumers sue to fix those errors. 15 U.S.C. §1681n(a) and §1681o(a). This is the key provision the FCRA uses to oversee the vastly important role these companies have taken on themselves, which Congress called a “grave 1 Federal Trade Commission, Report to Congress Under Section 319 of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 (“FTC Report”), at 2 (Dec. 2012). Apx-SCP-68.