The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals held that a plaintiff presented sufficient evidence to prove that a consumer reporting agency willfully violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), affirming a $250,000 compensatory damages award, but reducing a $3.3 million punitive damages award to $1 million. The court found that the consumer reporting agency had no procedure to ensure that an individual who had been mispaired with a report belonging to a person with a similar name would not be mismatched in the future with other reports of the same person. In this case, the plaintiff was denied multiple job opportunities because of failed background checks that misattributed a criminal record to the plaintiff.
