A judge signed the order. The case was sealed, expunged, or dismissed outright. Then an employer ran a background check and there it was again — the thing a court already took off your record, printed on a report that just cost you a job.
This happens more often than it should, and it is worth understanding why, because the answer determines whether you have a claim.
What an expungement actually does
An expungement or sealing order works on the government’s copy of the record. It tells the court, and usually the state police, to remove or restrict the record.
It does not reach into the private databases. Background check companies buy court records in bulk, sometimes years in advance, and store them. When a court seals a case, that company is not automatically told. If nobody refreshes the data, the old entry sits in the file and keeps getting sold.
That gap is where the legal problem lives — not in the expungement, which worked, but in what the reporting company did afterward.
What the law requires of the company
The Fair Credit Reporting Act puts the burden on the company that sells the report, not on you.
Under 15 U.S.C. § 1681e(b), a company preparing a consumer report must “follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy of the information concerning the individual about whom the report relates.” Selling a record a court has already sealed is difficult to square with that standard.
There is a second rule that applies specifically to employment screening. Under 15 U.S.C. § 1681k, a company reporting public record information likely to hurt your chances of getting a job must either maintain “strict procedures” to ensure the information is “complete and up to date,” or notify you at the time it reports the information so you can respond.
The seven-year rule, and its exception
There is a time limit in the statute, and it is narrower than most people expect.
Under 15 U.S.C. § 1681c(a)(2), records of arrest cannot be reported once they are more than seven years old. Under § 1681c(a)(5), the same seven-year cutoff applies to other adverse items — but that subsection contains an explicit carve-out for “records of convictions of crimes.”
So a conviction has no time limit under this section. It can be reported indefinitely. An arrest that did not lead to a conviction cannot be reported after seven years.
This matters because it tells you which argument you are making. If the entry is an old arrest, the age of it may be enough. If it is a conviction that a court later expunged, the argument is accuracy: the company is reporting something that no longer exists in the public record it claims to be drawing from.
What to do
- Get the report. The employer that turned you down has to tell you which company supplied it. Ask that company for your file directly.
- Get the court order. A certified copy of the expungement or sealing order is the single document that settles the question.
- Dispute it in writing, and send the order with it. When you dispute, the company must conduct a reasonable reinvestigation free of charge and generally finish within 30 days, under 15 U.S.C. § 1681i. If the item is inaccurate, incomplete, or cannot be verified, the statute says it has to come out.
- Keep everything. Dates, tracking numbers, the report itself, the rejection. If the entry stays on the report after you have sent proof that a court removed it, that paper trail is the case.
When it becomes a lawsuit
The Fair Credit Reporting Act gives you a private right of action. If a screening company kept reporting a sealed record after you told it what happened and gave it the order, that is the point at which a dispute becomes a claim.
If you are working through this now, our page on background check errors covers the wider set of mistakes these reports contain, and the step-by-step dispute guide walks through the letter itself. If the report has already cost you a job, what a background check lawyer does and whether you can sue the screening company are the next two questions.
Admitted in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; available to appear pro hac vice in other federal courts. You pay nothing unless we win.
Sources: 15 U.S.C. §§ 1681c, 1681e, 1681i, 1681k (United States Code); Federal Trade Commission, What Employment Background Screening Companies Need to Know About the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
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