11th Circuit: Bank not obligated to investigate FCRA dispute

Courts FCRA Credit Reporting Agency Class Action Eleventh Circuit Appellate

On April 25, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed a district court’s dismissal of a putative class action against a national bank, finding that the plaintiff failed to show an investigation would reveal the bank inaccurately furnished information to credit reporting agencies (CRAs). According to the opinion, after the plaintiff failed to make payments on his mortgage, the bank reported the delinquencies to the three CRAs. A Florida circuit court entered a final judgment of foreclosure in the bank’s favor, which the plaintiff paid two years later after the account was transferred to a different lender. Two years after he paid the foreclosure judgment, the plaintiff noticed that the CRAs showed his account as past due despite the fact that the judgment had been paid. However, following an investigation, the CRAs confirmed that the information provided by the bank was accurate, since it reflected two years of missed payments that the plaintiff later contended he was not obligated to make due to the filing for the foreclosure action. The plaintiff filed a class action suit alleging the bank violated the FCRA by failing to report that he had paid off the foreclosure judgment. The district court dismissed the case with prejudice, ruling that the bank satisfied its obligations under the FCRA, and that the plaintiff failed to support his claim that the bank was obligated to report the payoff after it transferred the account.

On appeal, the 11th Circuit agreed with the district court, opining that because the plaintiff never claimed that the bank was informed of the past-due status dispute by the CRAs, the bank was not obligated to investigate under the FCRA. The court noted that the plaintiff “never alleged that [the bank] received notification from the CRAs that he disputed his account's past-due status as of July 2017,. . .that the CRAs provided notification of any such dispute to [the bank],. . .or even that he contacted the CRAs to dispute that aspect of his credit reports.” The plaintiff further argued that the filing of the foreclosure action and acceleration of the loan relieved him of the obligation to make monthly payments. The 11th Circuit was “unconvinced” by the argument and said that, nonetheless, “[w]hether [the plaintiff] was obligated to make payments on the mortgage after the Foreclosure Action was filed is a currently unresolved legal, not a factual, question. Thus, even assuming [the bank] furnished information that turned out to be legally incorrect under some future ruling, [the bank’s] purported legal error was an insufficient basis for a claim under the FCRA.”