A popular tenant screening company used by low-income housing landlords has been providing inaccurate and biased background checks, potentially blocking qualified renters from being approved for apartments, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.
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.
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.
“Imagine being denied access to the home you deserve because a company you’ve never heard of churned out a specious background report based on defective data fed through a dubious algorithm,” John Davisson, EPIC’s director of litigation, said in a statement. “This nightmare is a reality for too many District residents, who are forced to overcome RentGrow’s faulty screening system to access essential housing opportunities—a burden that falls heaviest on already-marginalized communities. It’s past time for RentGrow to clean up its act.”
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.
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.
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.
Even when the data is accurate, EPIC and NACA allege, much of the information RentGrow’s risk scoring algorithms draw on, like criminal and eviction history, reflect systemic racial biases that disadvantage Black and Hispanic renters.
RentGrow, which is a subsidiary of the housing software company Yardi, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Source: Gizmodo