Dennis Goyette and his wife Peggy likely thought that the legal process would help them when they filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on December 26, 2024. In April 2025, they were given a discharge, which meant that all of their debts were forgiven. This included a joint credit card account with Achieva Credit Union. It should have been over after that. It wasn’t.
After the fact, Goyette found something that sounds a lot like a typing mistake, but the effects are much bigger than that. He checked his credit reports from all three major companies (TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian), and all of them still showed that the Achieva account was past due. Not freed from jail. It’s not solved. He did nothing but sit there and bring down his score, as if the bankruptcy court’s decision never happened.
It gets harder to say that it was just a mistake because Peggy Goyette’s credit reports from all three of the same agencies showed that the account was correct. Paid off. Done. Depending on whose name was on the report, the same account from the same joint bankruptcy filing was shown in two different ways. It’s hard to think of that kind of inconsistency as just a one-time system glitch.
Goyette and his lawyer, Joseph H. Kanee of Marcus & Zelman LLC, filed three separate class action lawsuits in federal court in Florida, one against each agency. The cases are currently being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. They are about alleged violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which says that credit reporting agencies must have reasonable procedures in place to make sure the information they publish is correct. The complaints clearly say that none of the three agencies had good enough systems in place to catch this kind of reporting that doesn’t make sense.
There is one more important detail in the Experian complaint that is worth mentioning. The filing says that Experian didn’t just leave the account open; it also marked it as “closed at consumer’s request,” which means something completely different and suggests that the data wasn’t being handled carefully after the bankruptcy was filed.
From reading the lawsuits, it seems like what happened to Goyette is probably not that unusual. Filing for bankruptcy is hard. Having joint accounts is an extra step. Credit bureaus also handle millions of records every year, mostly through automated systems that don’t always do a good job with tricky situations. The lawsuits really make us wonder if the rules that these agencies follow are really good enough for the complicated situations that come up with joint bank accounts in bankruptcy. Goyette says that the false reporting caused him real emotional pain, stress, and damage to his credit score.
People across the country who, within two years of filing for bankruptcy, had a joint account wrongly reported as not discharged in bankruptcy but correctly reported on the report of the other joint accountholder are the ones who are being sued. Given how common joint filings are, that could be a very important class.
It’s still not clear how these cases will go forward or whether the agencies will settle the claims or fight them. It’s important to note that TransUnion is already facing a separate certified class action over claims it sold credit reports to a bogus debt collector. This shows that the agency’s reporting practices are being looked at more closely right now.
Clear enough that it’s frustrating for people who go through the hard and often humiliating process of bankruptcy and come out on the other side hoping for a fresh start when they find that the credit bureaus haven’t caught up with reality. Goyette wants a trial by a jury and wants both compensatory and punitive damages. Case shines a light on something the credit reporting industry has been ignoring for a long time: the difference between what the law says and what shows up on your report. The courts may or may not agree with him.
