The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit Tuesday remanded a suit by a woman whose job offer was rescinded following a background check which revealed a criminal conviction.

In February 2016, Ria Schumacher filed a class-action lawsuit contact center SC Data Center for violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). The previous year, she had applied for a job with SC Data in Missouri, stating that she had never been “convicted of a felony,” merely arrested once aged 17 and acquitted. SC Data offered Schumacher a job but rescinded it once a background check revealed a conviction for murder and armed robbery.

While Schumacher had explicitly authorized a search and agreed that SC Data could refuse employment if she provided false or misleading information while applying, she claimed a right to “contextualize and explain” her criminal history and alleged three violations of the FCRA. In 2016, a month after Schumacher and SC Data agreed to settle, the US Supreme Court issued a decision dismissing an FCRA claim for lack of standing in Spokeo, Inc. v Robins since the plaintiff did not suffer a “concrete injury,” which led to SC Data moving to dismiss the class action on similar grounds.

On appeal by SC Data, after the district court decided that Schumacher had standing, the Eighth Circuit found Schumacher’s claims failed to meet the “constitutional minimum” for standing under Article III: an injury in fact (and not merely in law) that is “fairly traceable” to the defendant’s conduct and “likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision”.

On Schumacher’s first claim, that SC Data took adverse employment action based on a consumer report without first providing the report to the applicant, the court found she could not “create an additional right” under the FCRA to explain negative but accurate information in a consumer report. On her claim that SC Data obtained such a report without proper disclosure, the court found Schumacher suffered no concrete injury but only alleged technical violations such as the disclosure being in small font. On her final claim that she did not authorize a “consumer report,” the court found the criminal background report she authorized fell within the FCRA’s broad definition of a consumer report, though not it did not include “typical” information like credit history. Moreover, she failed to demonstrate a concrete or intangible injury to her privacy.

Finding a “lack of Article III standing required to confer federal jurisdiction,” the court remanded the case to the district court with directions to return it to the Missouri state court.