The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Hyundai’s U.S. financing arm $19.2 million after an investigation found that the company submitted false credit information on millions of accounts.
For more than four years, Hyundai Capital America knowingly presented credit bureaus with “inaccurate account information” about the payment history of consumer auto loans and leases, according to a statement released on Tuesday by the CFPB.
The CFPB said it found 8.7 million instances of inaccurate information that affected about 2.2 million consumer loans from January 2016 to March 2020. The issue stemmed from HCA’s use of “manual and outdated systems, processes and procedures.”
In many cases, the auto lender reported that customers were more than 30 days late on payments when that wasn’t the case, the agency said. The company violated a provision of the Fair Credit Reporting Act by not updating credit information “that it determined was not complete or accurate,” according to the CFPB statement.
Reporting this information “tarnished credit reports for millions of borrowers,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in the statement.
“Loan servicers must be complete and accurate when furnishing information that affects a borrower’s credit report,” he added.
HCA was ordered to pay $13.2 million to current and former customers as well as $6 million to the CFPB, according to the agency’s statement. This is the largest Fair Credit Reporting Act case the agency has taken against an auto servicer, the bureau said.
The company did not admit to any wrongdoing but has launched an “end-to-end review” of credit reporting practices, an HCA spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
