SURVEY OR RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THIRD CIRCUIT LAW: CREDIT REPORTING AGENCIES - Fair Credit Reporting Act - In Order to Discharge its Duty to Reinvestigate and Correct Inaccurate Information Under Section 611(a) of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a Consumer Reporting Agency Should Independently Verify Data if the Agency Knows or Should Know that the Original Source of the Information May Be Unreliable and the Cost of Investigating is Less than the Potential Harm that Reporting Inaccurate Information May Cause the Consumer - Cushman v. Trans Union Corp., 115 F.3d 220 (3d Cir. 1997).

In 1993, someone using the identifying information of plaintiff-appellant, Jennifer Cushman, applied for and received three credit cards under her name. See Cushman v. Trans Union Corp., 115 F.3d 220, 222 (3d Cir. 1997). This unknown person, who may have been a member of Cushman's Pennsylvania household, charged a total of approximately $ 2400 to these cards between 1993 and 1994 without Cushman's knowledge. Cushman was at that time a permanent resident of Pennsylvania but was attending college in Vermont. In 1994, a bill collector informed the plaintiff-appellant that Trans Union Corporation (TUC) would be publishing a consumer credit report denoting that Cushman was delinquent on her payments to the three credit grantors. Cushman then wrote to TUC notifying the agency that she had neither requested nor used those cards and suggested that the three cards had been obtained fraudulently by a third party. Cushman did not contact the credit grantors. A TUC clerk conducted an investigation that consisted of contacting the credit grantors to compare their respective records regarding Cushman's personal information and inquiring as to whether Cushman had requested opening a fraud investigation with these creditors. TUC's investigation revealed that Cushman's identifying information in the TUC report matched that in two of the creditors' files and that Cushman had not reported the fraud to the credit grantors. TUC therefore retained two delinquency entries in Cushman's credit report concerning those creditors. TUC was unable initially to contact the third credit grantor to verify the information, ...