The government’s consumer watchdog is adding its voice to a growing chorus of warnings about problems with a federal program that permits people who take public service jobs to have their student loans forgiven after a decade.þþConfusing rules, bureaucratic tripwires and outright errors are hindering thousands of people as they try to take advantage of the program, according to a report released Thursday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These are people who teach, serve in the military or work for a nonprofit organization, for example.þþThe volume of complaints is especially alarming because the program has not yet reached its first milestone: forgiving debts. Created in 2007, the program requires borrowers to do 10 years of service before any federal student loan debt is eliminated. The first wave of qualifying borrowers can submit applications in October.þþBut hundreds of complaints in the last year indicate many applicants are encountering obstacles, the agency said.þþMany public service jobs require increasingly high levels of education, which forces people to accrue larger debt, according to the report — even as they enter professions with traditionally low salaries. This phenomenon is why the program was established.þþBut then the abuses that the agency identified kick in.þþMany borrowers “point to a range of student loan industry practices that delay, defer, or deny access to critical consumer protections,” Seth Frotman, the bureau’s student loan ombudsman, wrote in an introduction to the report. “The bureau is committed to monitoring the industry for key issues and illegal practices affecting borrowers who are trying to access key consumer protections so they can continue to give back to their communities.”þþThe Education Department, which oversees the program, encourages borrowers to file certifications to verify that their employment qualifies and to help them track their progress toward meeting program requirements. Some 550,000 people had been approved by the end of 2016, department data showed.þþBut more than 250,000 of those borrowers had not made one qualifying monthly loan payment toward the 120 required to have their loans forgiven, according to an Education Department presentation at a conference last year.þþThe program’s rules are unusually complicated, and require borrowers to have a specific kind of loan (a direct federal loan), to make monthly payments under one type of plan (income-driven repayment) and to work for a qualifying employer (generally a public sector organization, or a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization).þþMany borrowers who expect to qualify are knocked out by technicalities, the consumer bureau found. Even paying too much can inadvertently disqualify people: Loan servicers, the companies that collect borrowers’ monthly payments, can apply excess amounts to future payments, which sometimes results in borrowers having periods in which no payment is due. Those months do not count on the repayment clock.þþOne nurse who contacted the consumer bureau said she was told that only 14 of the 48 payments she had made in four years qualified because she had overpaid in all of the other months.þþ“I feel like the last three years of my payments have been wasted,” she wrote in a complaint.þþOther problems arise from outright errors, the agency found. Many borrowers complained about inaccurate payment counts.þþDaniel B. Wrenne, a financial planner in Lexington, Ky., who works with dozens of people seeking loan forgiveness, said he had never had a client whose payments were calculated correctly.þþHe cited a case in which the borrower had been making qualifying payments for more than four years. But when the client submitted his certification, only nine payments were approved.þþ“I called the servicer with them and said we needed them to do an audit,” Mr. Wrenne said. “It took three months, but their conclusion was that they were wrong: He had made 49 payments that qualified.”þþEducation Department representatives did not respond to a request for comment on the consumer bureau’s report.þþFrustrated borrowers have been pressing lawmakers to intervene. Thirty-five senators sent a letter in April to Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, complaining that the department had told some borrowers who had been given approval notices — which indicated that their jobs qualified them for loan forgiveness — that those approvals were not reliable.þþThat problem was overshadowed the next month, when the Trump administration federal budget proposal called for the entire program to be eliminated.
Source: NY Times
