Landlords Froze Out Good Renters Due to Bad Data From Screening Company, Lawsuit Alleges | Consumer advocates have sued RentGrow, a tenant screening company used by landlords that provide low-income housing in D.C. and other cities, for failing to ensure that its background checks are accurate

Article highlights:

>Since 2018 the screening service RentGrow has had a contract with the District of Columbia Housing Authority to provide background checks on housing voucher recipients. It also works with private and market-rate landlords around the country to screen tenants.
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>Those screenings are based on poor quality data often riddled with errors, according to the lawsuit filed in a D.C. superior court by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA). They allege that RentGrow knows the data it uses can be unreliable and that the company’s entirely automated background check process doesn’t include sufficient fact checking to identify and prevent mistakes.
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>RentGrow and its competitors in the automatic tenant screening industry have repeatedly been accused by consumer lawsuits and federal regulators in recent years of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires companies to follow reasonable procedures to ensure that information included in background reports is accurate.
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>The EPIC and NACA lawsuit alleges that RentGrow’s primary source of data about potential tenants is a service called TransUnion Background Data Solutions and that RentGrow does not validate the sources or accuracy of that data. That’s “particularly troubling,” according to the lawsuit, because federal regulators fined TransUnion $15 million last year for failing to ensure the accuracy of the tenant screening data it provided.
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>As a result of the lack of quality control, RentGrow’s background reports for a tenant may incorrectly include arrest and eviction records for a different person who has the same name or may include records that are more than seven years old, which is prohibited by the Fair Credit Reporting Act, according to the lawsuit.

Not surprising to see these companies do even less than the absolute minimum to ensure that their data is accurate. Relying on known poor quality sources is not a good way to go for any company, least of all one that is selling those analytics to others.

I’ve had to threaten a lawsuit more than once for exactly this.

I love the fact that the claims are so wrong and stupid in the article

I just watched [this 8 minute video](https://youtu.be/XZemo1KVQMA?si=B9r2E6GPKm5W_5z0) last night about these out of control hidden companies blocking consumers from returning items to stores, often over bad data they somehow collected.