It might be, but only under specific conditions. Understand those before you assume you have an automatic legal claim. The Fair Credit Reporting Act does give you a real lever against a background check company that keeps reporting a record you had sealed or expunged. It is far from a blanket guarantee. How strong your position is depends on how completely the record was actually cleared and whether the company had any process in place to catch that.
What the FCRA actually requires
Under 15 U.S.C. § 1681e(b), a consumer reporting agency, meaning a company that compiles and sells background check reports for employment, housing, or lending decisions, has to use reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy in what it reports. That is a real, enforceable standard. A company that has no process for checking whether a record has since been sealed or expunged, and keeps reporting it anyway, can be found to have violated that standard. Section 1681k adds further obligations around how public record information specifically has to be handled.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has reinforced this reading. In guidance connected to a January 2024 background-screening rulemaking, the CFPB took the position that a consumer reporting agency lacking procedures to prevent reporting expunged, sealed, or otherwise legally restricted information is not meeting the reasonable-procedures standard. Multiple FCRA class actions over reporting expunged or sealed records have already settled, including one reported in the high six figures. The typical result: the screening company agrees to stop using the stale data.
The catch: the accuracy defense
Here is the part that gets left out of most explanations of this lever. In a case reviewed by a federal magistrate in 2024, the recommendation was no FCRA liability for a company that accurately reported a conviction that was technically expunged but still accessible through a public source. The reasoning: if the record is still findable through a legitimate public channel, reporting it is not inaccurate just because a court has since expunged the underlying case.
What this means practically: the FCRA lever is strongest when your record is fully sealed. That means it is no longer accessible through any public court portal, and the reporting company simply has not refreshed its data. That same lever gets weaker if a version of the record is still sitting somewhere a court considers public. This is exactly why we tell people to get their actual name search checked before assuming a dispute will win outright.
How to actually use this lever
Get a certified copy of your expungement or sealing order. Request a copy of the report from the company that ran it. Write a dispute letter naming the specific record, attach the order, and state clearly that the information should no longer be reported. Send it directly to the reporting company, not the employer or landlord who received the report. The company has 30 days from receipt to reinvestigate.
Keep the two tracks separate. A consumer reporting agency, the kind that sells a report tied to a specific employment or housing decision, is who the FCRA dispute goes to. A people-search site like Spokeo, BeenVerified, or Whitepages sells the same kind of information to anyone searching your name, with no eligibility decision attached. It sits outside the FCRA entirely. Those sites are addressed through opt-out requests and state privacy law instead. Our guides on removing personal information from Google cover that second track.
What the FCRA does not do
FCRA covers companies that sell background checks. It says nothing about newspapers. A federal appeals court settled that exact question in Martin v. Hearst Corp. in 2015: a news outlet cannot be forced to delete a true story about an arrest just because the record was later expunged. If a news article is part of what is showing up when someone searches your name, that requires a different approach entirely. One built on a voluntary editorial request rather than a legal claim. Our guide on why an expunged record still appears online covers all of the surfaces together and where each lever does and does not apply.
If you want a straight read on your specific situation
We do not tell every client the FCRA will solve their problem. For some it will not. We look at the actual report, the actual order, and whether the record is actually sealed before telling you where you stand. This is one lever in a stack that usually also includes direct requests to the sites involved and, sometimes, our own relationships with the companies holding the data. Our expungement reputation cleanup service runs all of it together.
If you are ready, send us the report and your order and we will tell you where you stand.