On April 8, 2025, the bankruptcy was discharged. Everything was in order. The court case was over. In late December 2024, Dennis Goyette and his spouse, Peggy, filed for joint Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which included the discharge of their joint Achieva Credit Union account. It ought to have been over by any standard.
Goyette noticed a problem when she later looked at his credit reports. The Achieva account was still listed as past due by Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, the three main reporting agencies. Not released. Not fixed. past due. The kind of notation that raises suspicions each time a lender pulls your file and subtly lowers your credit score. The fact that the account was accurately listed as discharged in bankruptcy on Peggy Goyette’s credit reports from all three of the same agencies made it even more bizarre.
the identical account. The same bankruptcy. Depending on whose report you were looking at, there were two completely different results.
In late June 2026, Goyette filed three distinct class action lawsuits in federal court in Florida, suing Equifax Information Services LLC, Experian Information Solutions Inc., and TransUnion LLC, respectively. The cases, which are assigned to Judge John L. Badalamenti in the Middle District of Florida, claim that each agency violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act by failing to maintain the kind of reasonable accuracy procedures that the law mandates. The complaints were filed within days of one another by his lawyer, Joseph H. Kanee of Marcus & Zelman LLC.
This FCRA argument isn’t all that complicated. For many years, credit bureaus have been required by law to provide accurate consumer information. The internal contradiction this case reveals is what makes it seem worthwhile to consider.
Using the same underlying data from the same bankruptcy filing, it is not a clerical error if one spouse’s account is accurately reported as discharged while the other’s is not. It raises a more structural possibility: the systems these organizations employ to handle joint bankruptcy accounts might not have been designed to do so in the first place. TransUnion “does not have adequate policies and procedures in place” to stop logically inconsistent reporting, according to the Goyette lawsuit.
It’s important to note that the Experian complaint goes one step further, claiming that the company listed the Achieva account as “closed at consumer’s request”—a description that is not only false but also potentially deceptive to any lender examining the file.
Goyette claims that the false reporting negatively impacted his credit score and caused him great emotional distress. In court documents, such claims may sound formulaic, but they are simple to comprehend. Anyone who has experienced bankruptcy is aware of how humble the process is. It stings in a certain way to discover that the system that was meant to register your new beginning instead continued to mark you as delinquent.
The lawsuits aim to represent a nationwide class of consumers who had a joint account reported as not discharged within two years of filing, despite the fact that the same account was accurately reported on the report of another joint accountholder. The class might be quite large. In Florida, joint bankruptcies are not uncommon, and there is no reason to believe that this kind of inconsistency is exclusive to one couple.
It remains to be seen if this eventually compels the bureaus to redesign their joint-account processing systems or if it ends quietly. Usually, these things take time. However, the Dennis Goyette case is worthwhile for anyone who has filed for bankruptcy with a spouse and then wondered why their credit report still appears to be a mess.
