The suit claims that the plaintiff was a denied a job based on the results of a background check produced by InfoMart that contained a criminal record belonging to a different individual and information regarding a civil judgment that InfoMart neglected to report had been vacated.

The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires that consumer reporting agencies, such as InfoMart, to notify job applicants if their background check contains any adverse public records and the company must then afford the subject of the report the opportunity to explain or dispute any of those records. The plaintiff alleges that InfoMart failed to satisfy either of those requirements.

Furthermore, the plaintiff claims that InfoMart acted as though they compiled the information within the report themselves when they had actually acquired the information from TransUnion. This practice runs afoul of FCRA requirements that consumer reporting agencies disclose the sources of information they report.

“Defendant is aware of its obligations under the FCRA, but chooses not to comply because the costs of compliance would harm its bottom line and impair its business model,” the plaintiff wrote. “Discovery will show that defendant routinely fails to reveal its true sources of public-record information, like TransUnion, in its FCRA file disclosures. It makes this choice despite the clearly worded requirement in the FCRA that [consumer reporting agencies] reveal the sources of the information they report.”

The case is Robert Mills II v. InfoMart Inc., case number 3:17-cv-00048, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia.

Source: Law360.com, 5/1/2017