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What constitutes "willful non compliance"?


Linx04
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Legal minds and non legal minds I need your help. In a current lawsuit a furnisher reported the same tradeline TWICE. It was disputed (both trade lines) FOUR times and VERIFIED FOUR TIMES. Does that constitute "willful non-compliance" The U.S. Supreme Court gave us guidance. I need some help on this one.

From SCOTUS

"However, the Court adopted a narrow definition of "reckless" and reversed the Ninth Circuit's holding that Safeco had willfully violated the statute. Specifically, the Court held that recklessness involves "conduct violating an objective standard: action entailing an unjustifiably high risk of harm that is either known or so obvious that it should be known." To be liable for willful violation of FCRA, a company must be more than "merely careless.""

 

If the companies were right that "willfully" limits liability under § 1681n(a) to knowing violations, the modifier "knowingly" in § 1681n(a)(1)(B) would be superfluous and incongruous; it would have made no sense for Congress to condition the higher damages under § 1681n(a) on knowingly obtaining a report without a permissible purpose if the general threshold of any liability under the section were knowing misconduct. If, on the other hand, "willfully" covers both knowing and reckless disregard of the law, knowing violations are sensibly understood as a more serious subcategory of willful ones, and both the preamble and the subsection have distinct jobs to do. See United States v. Menasche, 348 U.S. 528, 538-539, 75 S.Ct. 513, 99 L.Ed. 615 (1955) ("`[G]ive effect, if possible, to every clause and word of a statute'" (quoting Montclair v. Ramsdell, 107 U.S. 147, 152, 2 S.Ct. 391, 27 L.Ed. 431 (1883))).

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