In a rare victory for a consumer fighting to protect his credit score, a three-judge federal appeals panel in Pasadena slammed Experian on Tuesday for such carelessness that it refused to send the case back to the trial court, saying "no rational jury could find that the company wasn't negligent."
Even rarer, the appeals panel's decision was a reversal of a ruling it had made just four months earlier.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Monday, October 01, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 44 words Type of Material: Correction
Credit scores: A Sept. 26 Business article said a federal appeals court ruled against credit reporting firm Experian on a 3-2 vote. The vote, in a case brought by a man who said Experian would not correct his credit score, was 2 to 1.
Federal law requires Experian and other credit reporting companies -- which, the panel said, traffic "in the reputations of ordinary people" -- to verify the accuracy of information in Americans' credit files.
Los Angeles resident Jason Dennis, the plaintiff in the case, tried for four years to persuade Experian to erase damaging and erroneous information that its investigators had added to his credit report.
His situation is all too common, said Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director of U.S. PIRG, a Boston-based consumer advocacy group. Mierzwinski called the number of complaints about obvious mistakes in credit reports "gigantic."
A 2004 PIRG survey found that nearly one-third of credit reports contained errors serious enough to cause the denial of credit, employment or insurance.
Dennis, a 32-year-old television production coordinator, said he discovered the mistake when he tried to buy a computer. Denied a loan, he pulled his report and saw that Experian had listed a court judgment entered against him by a former landlord.
Actually, Dennis said and the appeals panel confirmed Tuesday, the landlord had filed a written statement with Los Angeles County Superior Court in late 2002 saying that he would drop a lawsuit he had filed when Dennis fell behind on his rent once Dennis cleared the debt. Dennis had done that by January 2003.
Dennis said he provided Experian with a court form showing the landlord's suit would be dismissed once the back rent was paid. When Experian stood by its claim that a judgment had been entered, Dennis sued in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleging that the company had violated provisions of federal and state credit reporting laws.
"They made it seem like it was my fault that it was reported erroneously," Dennis said Tuesday.
That, in fact, was Experian's argument -- that if anyone was in a position to correct the error in the credit report it was Dennis himself, something the plaintiff said he tried again and again to do.
