Under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, employers must notify consumers that the company may obtain background checks for employment purposes. The statute requires these disclosures to be on a completely standalone document, without any extraneous information.

During the initial application process, the plaintiff claims Fred Meyer presented him with three separate background check disclosures, each of which contained “unnecessary, extraneous and unlawful information.”

After receiving the results of the plaintiff’s background check from a third-party consumer reporting agency, the Fred Meyer store gave the plaintiff a copy of his report and a pre-adverse action notice. The notice instructed the plaintiff to address any concerns about the report’s results with the consumer reporting agency, not with Fred Meyer. The plaintiff was fired by Fred Meyer a few days after receiving the pre-adverse action notice.

The plaintiff argues that by directing any disputes about the report to the consumer reporting agency rather than to Fred Meyer, the company failed to give him a meaningful opportunity to address any problems with the report before taking final adverse action against him based on the report’s contents.

The plaintiff is seeking to represent two classes: The first class seeks to cover all Fred Meyer applicants who applied on or after Nov. 8, 2015, who received the same allegedly inadequate disclosure forms. The second class would cover all Fred Meyer applicants who were subject to adverse employment action on or after Nov. 8, 2015, based in whole or in part on the results of a background check procured by Fred Meyer, who also received a notice telling them to contact the third-party consumer reporting agency rather than Fred Meyer.

Source: TopClassActions.com, 11/9/2017