HR8588-119

What This Bill Does

The Housing FIRST Act amends the Fair Credit Reporting Act to create a new tenant screening purposes category. A tenant screening report is a consumer report used to evaluate a consumer for rental housing or for retention as a renter or tenant. The bill also treats denial of housing or any other rental-housing decision that adversely affects a current or prospective tenant or renter as an adverse action. It updates FCRA provisions that currently reference employment purposes so they also cover tenant screening purposes, housing providers, prospective housing providers, rental housing, and fair housing.

The bill creates a new FCRA section 605D for consumer reports furnished for tenant screening purposes. Consumer reporting agencies may not include arrest records; juvenile adjudications or convictions, including juvenile cases tried as adult cases; noncriminal state or local law-enforcement citations; criminal cases resolved through successful completion of diversion, deferred adjudication, deferred entry of judgment, drug court, or similar state-law programs; convictions for which the consumer completed the sentence; convictions for which the consumer is on probation or parole; offenses related to fees or back payments associated with court costs or incarceration; expunged, sealed, vacated, set-aside, or similarly relieved conviction or arrest records; and convictions for which the consumer received a pardon or clemency.

The bill extends FCRA conditions for furnishing and using consumer reports to tenant screening purposes and fair housing. It clarifies that when a consumer requests the sources of information in a consumer report, the consumer reporting agency must identify any entity from which it received the information. It also creates duties for users of consumer reports for housing purposes: if a person procures a tenant screening report and takes an adverse action, including denial of rental housing, based wholly or partly on that report, the person must provide the consumer an adverse-action notice within three days and must give the specific reasons for the adverse action, including the information in the consumer report that caused the decision.

The bill amends FCRA preemption language so state regulation is barred for the time after which information excluded from consumer reports becomes obsolete. It also removes the existing exception that allowed records of criminal convictions to remain outside one FCRA exclusion for obsolete information, thereby extending the exclusion to conviction records. A final technical amendment corrects references within section 615(h)(8).

Who Benefits and How

Current and prospective renters benefit because tenant screening reports would exclude many arrest, juvenile, diversion, completed-sentence, probation, parole, court-debt, expunged, sealed, pardoned, or clemency-related records. Formerly incarcerated housing applicants benefit because older or resolved criminal legal records would be less likely to block rental housing. Tenants and rental applicants benefit from clearer source disclosures and from adverse-action notices within three days that must identify the specific consumer-report information causing a housing denial or other adverse rental decision. Housing providers may benefit from clearer FCRA rules for tenant screening purposes.

Who Bears the Burden and How

Consumer reporting agencies and tenant screening companies bear compliance burdens because they must classify tenant screening reports, suppress prohibited criminal and related records, disclose source entities, and adjust obsolete-information reporting. Housing providers and prospective housing providers bear duties to follow FCRA tenant-screening conditions and provide prompt adverse-action notices with specific reasons. State regulators bear reduced authority over obsolete-reporting time limits where FCRA preemption applies. Landlords and property managers may have less access to criminal-record information when evaluating tenant applicants.

Key Provisions

• Defines tenant screening purposes and adds rental-housing adverse actions to the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
• Prohibits tenant screening reports from including arrests, juvenile records, noncriminal citations, diversion or deferred cases, completed-sentence convictions, probation or parole convictions, court-debt offenses, expunged or sealed records, and pardoned or clemency records.
• Extends FCRA furnishing and use conditions to tenant screening purposes and fair housing.
• Requires consumer reporting agencies to disclose source entities for information in consumer reports.
• Requires housing adverse-action notices within three days and specific reasons tied to the report information used.
• Expands FCRA preemption over state obsolete-reporting time limits and removes the conviction-record exception from an FCRA reporting exclusion.
• Makes a technical correction to section 615(h)(8).