Released: September 26, 2007

Experian ‘negligent,’ judges say

Source: Molly Selvin, Los Angeles Times (Free Registration)

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.

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.

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