by Jeff Sovern Here. Two points from the Executive Summary, though there's quite a bit more than this: The NCRAs have created an automated system for handling consumer disputes and forwarding them to data furnishers. Through this automated system – called e-OSCAR – the NCRAs provide furnishers with one or two numeric codes indicating the […]
Category Archives: Credit Reporting
by Jeff Sovern One of the groups, the Woodstock Institute, has a report here. Among the reasons given are Wells Fargo's payday lending practices. The following excerpt from the Woodstock report has more: "Wells Fargo's mortgage servicing practices unfairly push some borrowers into foreclosure, devastating families and harming neighborhoods. Our clients continue to have their […]
by Jeff Sovern For the credit reporting section of our casebook, I've been looking into studies of credit report errors. The FTC is in the process of conducting a long-term study of that subject, and along the way has conducted some pilot studies. One such pilot study subjected the credit reports of 128 people to in-depth […]
United States v. Bormes is the Supreme Court's first opinion of the term. It deals with the question of where to look to determine whether the government has waived sovereign immunity in FCRA cases. SCOTUS Blog coverage can be found here.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Sorrell v. IMS Health, there’s been a lot of speculation about the extent to which previously accepted commercial speech regulation may now be subject to “heightened” or strict scrutiny under the First Amendment. Sensing an opportunity, lawyers who regularly represent consumer reporting agencies invoked […]
Lea Krivinskas Shepard of Loyola Chicago has written Toward a Stronger Financial History Antidiscrimination Norm, 53 Boston College Law Review (2012). Here's the abstract: This Article examines a topic at the intersection of consumer protection and antidiscrimination law: the use by employers and licensing organizations of applicants’ credit reports and financial histories in the hiring […]
by Jeff Sovern Burrell v. DFS Services, LLC, 753 F.Supp.2d 438 (D.N.J. 2010) is a couple years old now but we haven't blogged about it before and the problem it describes has not been fixed so it still merits atttention. Burrell was victimized by an identity thief and complained about it to the creditors rather […]
Here. It might serve for a series of slides for those teaching consumer law.
Adi Osovsky, a Harvard SJD candidate, has written The Misconception of the Consumer as a Homo Economicus: A Behavioral Economic Approach to Consumer Protection in the Credit Reporting System, forthcoming in the Suffolk University Law Review. Here's the abstract: The significant increase in the number of consumer transactions, along with the expansion of information technology, […]