Consumer Credit Reporting Agency

contest came about after the claimant had rented a Hyundai dealer truck.

At the end of his rental agreement, when he gave the car back, the claimant had to pay more than $623.00 in charges for excessive tear and tear, $400.00 for a "disposition fee" and about $80.00 in tax. A lawyer, the claimant, sent a $623.42 cheque for the amount due for the deterioration of the car - and noted on the tool that the full amount had been paid.

Autohaus took the cheque and commissioned a debt collecting agency to recover the amounts due. Nevertheless, the claimant declined to make the fee payments, claiming that the dealer's assumption of $623.42 was an agreement and settlement for the full amount. The claimant then uncovered divergent information about his credit reports - Equifax declared an arrears account for the charges due to the debt collecting agency.

As Equifax declined to delete the information from its reports, the plaintiff lodged a complaint. The applicant inter alia claimed that Equifax had omitted to carry out an adequate reopening of the investigation, which would have shown that the information provided by the debt collecting agency was incorrect. Pursuant to 15 U.S.C. 1681i(a)(1)(A), the FCRA requests consumer reporting authorities (or "CRAs") to perform a "reasonable retrial" to establish whether controversial information in a consumer's record is imprecise.

Critical while the law requires credit rating agencies to carry out more than a fleeting examination of a litigation, it resolutely does not demand that credit rating agencies assess and judge the juridical benefits of a litigation between a borrower and the debt collecting agency. At Thomas, the Regional Tribunal held that for Equifax to establish that the information provided by the collecting agency was incorrect, as the plaintiff alleged, Equifax would have to establish that the plaintiff did not actually pay HMF the charges demanded by the defendant.

In the end, the plaintiff's credit agency mirrored a real statement: the debt collecting agency demanded a sum that the claimant did not want to pay. Consumer have other, more appropriate possibilities than the Fair Credit Reporting Act to remedy this situation.