Robert Sustrik v. Equifax Information Services

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Decided: July 22, 2020
• Docket: 19-15791
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS JUL 22 2020 MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

ROBERT SUSTRIK; SHARON BARNUM, No. 19-15791

Plaintiffs-Appellants, D.C. No. 2:16-cv-02866-RFB-NJK v.

EQUIFAX INFORMATION SERVICES, MEMORANDUM* LLC,

Defendant-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Nevada Richard F. Boulware II, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted July 13, 2020 San Francisco, California

Before: IKUTA and HURWITZ, Circuit Judges, and TAGLE,** District Judge.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”) imposes requirements on credit

reporting agencies, and provides a private cause of action for willful or negligent

violations of those requirements. See 15 U.S.C. §§ 1681n, 1681o. Two FCRA

* This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. ** The Honorable Hilda G. Tagle, United States District Judge for the Southern District of Texas, sitting by designation. provisions, 15 U.S.C. § 1681i(a)(3)(B), (a)(6)(A), require a consumer be notified of

the outcome of a reinvestigation triggered by the consumer’s dispute about

information in a credit report.

In this action, Robert Sustrik and Sharon Barnum allege that Equifax

Information Services, LLC, violated the FCRA by failing to provide notice of the

results of reinvestigations of items on their credit reports. Equifax had reinvestigated

each disputed item and found no inaccuracies. Plaintiffs did not challenge the

outcome of the reinvestigations, but only Equifax’s failure to provide notice of the

results. The district court granted summary judgment to Equifax, finding Plaintiffs

had failed to “satisfy the prima facie element of inaccuracy as required by the Ninth

Circuit for the FCRA claims arising under Section 1681i.” We have jurisdiction

over Plaintiffs’ appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and affirm.

Although the text of the FCRA does not condition the duty to reinvestigate on

inaccuracy in a credit report, we held in Dennis v. BEH–1, LLC that “section 1681i

creates no duty to reinvestigate where ‘the credit report accurately reflect[s] the

status of the information contained in the public records.’” 520 F.3d 1066, 1069 (9th

Cir. 2008) (alteration in original) (quoting Williams v. Colonial Bank, 826 F. Supp.

415, 418 (M.D. Ala. 1993)). We subsequently confirmed that “the FCRA’s

reinvestigation provision, 15 U.S.C. § 1681i, . . . require[s] that an actual inaccuracy

exist for a plaintiff to state a claim.” Carvalho v. Equifax Info. Servs., LLC, 629 F.3d

2 876, 890 (9th Cir. 2010). Under our precedent, the district court therefore did not

err in holding that this suit failed because there was no genuine dispute that the

information in the Plaintiffs’ files was accurate.

AFFIRMED.