The original complaint, filed in 2009 against The Freeman Company, a Dallas-based event planning company, alleged that the company racially discriminated against an applicant by denying her a position after conducting a credit history check.
As evidence in their case, the EEOC commissioned a report from an industrial and organizational psychologist to support their claims of credit history checks disproportionately effecting black job applicants and criminal history checks unduly impacting black and male applicants. However, the court decided to reject the report based on erroneous statistical information, claiming the report was “rife with analytical errors,” and further “had basic arithmetic mistakes, incorrectly labeled the race of some individuals, and inexplicably omitted hundreds, if not thousands, of more recent applicants.” The lower court went on to grant The Freeman Company summary judgment in August of 2013.
The Feb. 20th ruling by the Fourth Circuit court not only affirmed the previous ruling by the lower court, but further lambasted the fallacious EEOC report, claiming it “cherry-picked data to skew the analysis while committing an alarming number of errors and omissions, making it impossible to rely on any of [its] conclusions.”
Source: Law360.com, 2/20/2015
Posted: March 23, 2015