Showing posts with label Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Show all posts

Saturday, October 1, 2022

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reports that the Federal Student Loan Program is a mess

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines snafu as "a situation marked by errors or confusion." The word is an acronym for "Situation Normal, All Fouled (or Fucked) Up." 

Earlier this month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a report confirming what we already knew:  the federal student program is all f-cked up. The CFPB's publication is titled Supervisory Highlights Student Loan Servicing Special Edition, which doesn't tell you a damn thing about what's in the report. Perhaps that was intentional.

Although the bureaucratic writing style is turgid. The report makes clear that the federal student loan program is spectacularly mismanaged.

Here are some highlights:

The CFPB found that many colleges and universities refuse to release academic transcripts to students who are indebted to their institution.  This practice often makes it impossible for former students to transfer to another school or get a job. The CFPB believes this practice is "abusive under the Consumer Financial Protection Act." Duh!

Second, CFPB criticizes student-loan servicers for bungling the administration of income-based repayment plans. Many borrowers in IBRPs are kicked out of these programs because they failed to certify their annual income annually. Those borrowers are then required to get recertified.

CFPB  accused student-loan servicers of improperly denying borrowers' applications to get reinstated in an IBRP. "Examiners found that servicers engaged in a deceptive act or practice by providing consumers with a misleading denial reason after they submitted an IDR recertification application."

For example, servicers sometimes don't tell borrowers they must certify their income when they were not in an IBRP. Then they refuse to reinstate those borrowers because they didn't provide their income information.

CFPB also accused servicers of giving parent borrowers inaccurate information about their eligibility for an IBRPeligibility.

In short, the CFPB scolded for-profit colleges for withholding academic transcripts and student-loan services for spectacular mismanagement of income-based repayment plans.

Tellingly, the CFPB did not identify a single malefactor or suggest even one substantive action to correct the problems it identified. Instead, it ended its report with this pathetic and syntax-tangled sentence:

Regardless, where the Bureau identifies violations of Federal consumer financial law, it intends to continue to exercise all of its authorities to ensure that servicers and loan holders make consumers whole.

How reassuring! 

Why didn't the CFPB propose that Congress pass a law that would make it illegal for a college to withhold academic transcripts from students, regardless of the reason?

Why didn't the CFPB call for the Department of Education to collaborate with the Internal Revenue Service to determine the annual income of students in IBRPs? It makes no sense for loan servicers to keep borrowers out of IBRPs because they didn't certify their income when the government can quickly determine annual income by looking at borrowers' annual federal income tax returns.

For some reason, the Department of Education and the CFPB would rather keep the student loan program in a snafu condition than take reasonable steps to make it operate more efficiently.

Snafu









Sunday, October 10, 2021

No reply: What to do when the corporate office won't respond to your complaint

This happened once before
When I cam to your door
No reply
They said it wasn't you
But I saw you peep through your window

                                                                                                                        The Beatles 

Have you ever tried to resolve a dispute with a corporate entity: a bank, a car rental agency, a credit card company? How did it turn out? Most times--I'm guessing--you just gave up without getting your problem solved.

A couple of years ago, Chase Bank flagged a fraudulent transfer out of my checking account.  Three thousand dollars of my money slipped into the account of a stranger through Chase's Zelle digital payment network.

Chase admitted that the transfer was unauthorized and that I was not at fault. But it refused to return my money. The word came down from on high: Once money is transferred through Zelle, it cannot be recovered.

My wife and I happened to be Chase Private Clients at the time because we had some retirement savings with Chase. Made no difference

I emailed the Chase broker, who was supposedly handling my money. He called me on the phone and asked me not to communicate with him by email because it could cause him problems with the SEC.

I made numerous phone calls to Chase representatives, and I spoke to a different person every time I called. No satisfaction.

Then I switched tactics. I made a phone call to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. To my surprise, someone answered my phone, took my complaint, and assured me that Chase would be notified that same day.

Then I filed a complaint with the Federal Banking Commission and the Louisiana Banking Commission. I also discovered I could file a lawsuit against Chase in a Louisiana small claims court. The cost? Only $25, and I could file it electronically from my home computer.

I was typing up my lawsuit when a Chase representative from "Corporate" called.  His voice sounded like James Earl Jones--in other words--the voice of God.

"Mr. Fossey," he intoned in a deep, stentorian voice,  "we are going to return your money."

We all know that big, multinational corporations have insulated themselves from their customers. You simply can't get through to someone who has the authority to fix your problem.

Here's what you need to do:

1) Be dignified. Don't curse, yell, or threaten the human-robot you talk with on the phone. 

2) Be patient and persistent and keep records of your communications.

3) File complaints with any federal or state agency with regulatory authority over the corporation that is stonewalling you.

4) As a last resort, sue the offending party in small claims court. 

I haven't actually had to file a small claims suit against a corporate entity. So far, I have gotten my disputes settled through persistence. But I think it can be a handy tool for confronting a recalcitrant corporation.

You can represent yourself in small claims court. You don't need a lawyer. And in Louisiana, you can sue a corporation doing business in the state through the Secretary of State's Office. Your state probably has a similar process for getting service on corporations.

Our soulless corporations get more greedy, more arrogant, and more indifferent to their customers with each passing day. If you get stiffed by one, you should fight back.


"Mr. Fossey, thou shall get thy money back."



 


Thursday, November 9, 2017

Millions of Older Americans Are Delinquent On Their Loans: Long-Term Repayment Plans Will Make the Problem Worse

Several decades after obtaining their college degrees, millions of older Americans are still paying on their student loans. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the percentage of student borrowers over 60 years of age who carry student-loan debt increased by 20 percent from 2012 to 2017.

Even more alarming is the rising number of older student borrowers who are delinquent on their student loans. In all but five states, delinquency rates among older student debtors went up over the last five years.

In California, for example, more than 300,000 people age 60 or older hold $11 billion in student-loan debt, and 15 percent of these borrowers are delinquent.

Delinquency rates for older borrowers vary substantially from state to state. In Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia, one out of five student-borrowers age 60 or older are delinquent on their loan payments.

As the CFPB noted, these data show that an increasing number of older Americans are still shouldering student-loan debt at an age when most of them are living on fixed incomes.  And these data do not reflect the Department of Education’s recent campaign to recruit more and more college borrowers into income-based repayment plans that can stretch out for as long as 20 and even 25 years.

During Obama’s second term in office, the Department of Education rolled out two relatively generous income-driven repayment plans (IDRs): PAYE and REPAYE.  Both plans call for participants to pay 10 percent of their adjusted gross income on their student loans for a period of 20 years.

Most commentators have viewed these initiatives as a humane way to lower struggling borrowers’ monthly payments. But for many of the people in IDRS, probably most of them, the monthly payments don’t cover accruing interest. For these people, their IDRs cause their loan balances to go up even if they make regular monthly payments.  Thus, IDR participants will enter their retirement years with thousands of dollars in unpaid student-loan debt.

The CFPB report should be alarming to everyone. Already, we are seeing student borrowers enter their sixties with increasing levels of debt; and delinquency rates are climbing.

This is a crisis right now, but as the IDR participants reach retirement age, the crisis will grow worse. Indeed, it will be a calamity as millions of people try to service their student loans while surviving on Social Security checks and small pensions.

References

Older consumers and student loan debt vary by state. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, August 2017.


Friday, October 27, 2017

Why Does the Department of Education Hate Student Loan Debtors Just So Much? Article by Steve Rhode

By  on October 25, 2017

If I was ever to get into an academic research argument on the role of government, this would be the time. Frankly I’m just getting pissed off by the apparent disregard for student loan debtors by the Trump Department of Education. And before you react that this is a Trump reaction, it’s not. This is an outrage and embarrassment of the actions taken collectively against consumers and student when it comes to student loan debt.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. – Source
The last administration was trying to protect students from being misled by schools to enroll them based on false promises and employment assertions. That’s been significantly halted.
The previous administration expanded the Borrower Defense to Repayment program to allow students who had been defrauded by their schools a chance to have their loans forgiven and the loans clawed back from the schools. That’s been significantly halted.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is suing Navient over poor student loan servicing and Navient says it has no duty to provide good advice to student loan debtors. The Department of Education is not participating in that fight by backing up the CFPB and in fact has said they will stop sharing information with the CFPB.
Now we will have to see what the Department of Education does next on this. The student loan lending industry is making the argument to the Department of Education they should not be subject to state probes into their industry. The position is the federal law and should prevent states from investigating the abusive practices of the student loan industry.
Just to show you how crazy this has all become, even Texas thinks this argument is crap and Texas has typically been the business comes first state.
“Joining a bipartisan coalition of 25 states, Attorney General Ken Paxton today called on U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to reject a campaign by student loan servicers and debt collectors to dismantle state oversight of the student loan industry. In recent years, Texas and other states investigated and prosecuted a number of student loan industry abuses, winning settlements in the tens of millions of dollars for vulnerable student borrowers.
In a letter to Secretary DeVos, Attorney General Paxton and his counterparts point out that the student loan industry continues to lobby the U.S. Department of Education for more control and autonomy at a time when it is still in urgent need of reform.” – Source
If the Department of Education was doing anything to hold schools and lenders accountable for the massive levels of student loan debt issued with fraud and serviced with incompetence then maybe all of these events would not matter, because they would not happen or be allowed to continue.
But I’ve got an old expression for you: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

*******

This article appeared on the Personal Finance Syndication Network web site and also on The Get Out of Debt Guy site. Steve Rhode is the Get Out of Debt Guy and has been helping good people with bad debt problems since 1994. You can learn more about Steve here.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Terrific essay by Steve Rhode: Is Betsy DeVos Nuckin Futs With Break From Student Loan Debtor Protections?

This terrific essay by Steve Rhode first appeared on Consumer Debt Guy blog site on September 6, 2017.
***
By Steve Rhode on September 6, 2017
   
The Consumerist is reporting the Department of Education has terminated its cooperation with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in dealing with student loan servicer problems.
“DeVos accuses the Bureau of not living up to its end of agreements established in 2011 and 2013, by doing too much to hold loan servicers accountable.”
“DeVos suggests that actions taken by the CFPB to rein in shoddy student loan servicers and collectors only confuses borrowers.
“The Department takes exception to the CFPB unilaterally expanding its oversight role to include the Department’s contracted federal student loan servicers,” DeVos wrote. “The Department has full oversight responsibility for federal student loans.”
However, the Department’s ability to root out fraud was thrown into question last week, when the agency appointed former for-profit college executive Julian Schmoke to run the Department’s enforcement division.
While Schmoke currently works as a high-ranking director at a community college in Georgia, he spent several years working for DeVry University, a college that has been repeatedly accused of fraud by both federal and state authorities.”
“The claim that the CFPB ‘unilaterally’ expanded its oversight role over servicers and collectors of federal student loans is unfounded,” Persus Yu, director of the National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Project, said in a statement.
“Education is now trying to stop the CFPB from handling loan-related complaints, but Education’s failures are what led Congress to give the CFPB authority to help students,” Yu said. “DeVos is prioritizing the interests of predatory for-profit schools, debt collectors, and troubled student loan services over the interests of student loan borrowers.”

This recent action and the fact the Department of Education has not approved Borrower Defense claims leads me to wonder where is any proof the Department of Education gives a damn about student loan debtors.

Monday, June 26, 2017

Trump should fire Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education for gross incompetence. If Trump fails to act, Congress needs to do whatever is necessary to drive her from office

Let us take our minds off Russia for just a moment and focus on a massive economic problem that affects millions of Americans: the collapsing student loan program. Forty-three million Americans now hold about $1.4 trillion in student loan debt, and a lot of that money will never be paid back. 

As the New York Times recently reported, borrowers defaulted at the rate of 3,000 a day last year; and a total of more than 8 million people are in default. Default rates are highest in the for-profit college industry; five-year default rates in this sector are almost 50 percent.

The Department of Education is trying to keep default rates down by pressuring borrowers into income-driven repayment plans, but that tactic isn't working. Nearly half the people who sign up for those plans drop out within three years; and a lot of defaulting borrowers don't even bother to sign up.

In short, the federal student loan program is a train wreck, a catastrophe, an unmitigated disaster. 

As President Trump's Secretary of Education, it is Betsy DeVos's job to address the student-loan crisis; but in a series of wrongheaded decisions, DeVos has demonstrated that she is either grossly incompetent or in bed with the sleazy for-profit college industry. President Trump must fire her immediately, and if he does not, then Congress needs to bring all its forces to bear to drive her from office.

Here is a brief list of DeVos's fumbling misbehavior:

First, she hired consultants from the for-profit industry to give her advice, which is like a hiring a burglar to be a bank guard.

Second, she canceled the Obama administration's order that restrained loan processors from slapping huge fees on student-loan defaulters who quickly brought their loans back into repayment status.

Third, she is overhauling the Department of Education's new regulations for processing borrowers' applications to have their student loans forgiven based on claims of institutional fraud. This bureaucratic delay tactic will leave thousands of defrauded college borrowers in limbo for months and even years.

And finally, DeVos blocked implementation of a Department of Education directive banning for-profit colleges from forcing students to sign mandatory arbitration clauses as a condition of enrollment.

In my view, allowing the for-profit colleges to continue including mandatory arbitration clauses in their student enrollment documents is DeVos's most outrageous decision. Mandatory arbitration clauses bar students from suing their institution for fraud and prevent students from banding together to file class actions suits against colleges that engage in massive fraudulent behavior.

About a year ago, the Century Foundation urged the Department of Education to require the for-profits to stop including mandatory arbitration clauses in their enrollment documents, and two for-profits--University of Phoenix and DeVry University, publicly agreed to abandoned them voluntarily.

Numerous commentators have criticized the use of mandatory arbitration agreements when they are used by corporations to insulate them from lawsuits. Just within the last year, two courts have struck down mandatory arbitration clauses that for-profit education providers tried to enforce. In one case, a university's arbitration agreement required California students to arbitrate their claims in Indiana!

Since taking office, DeVos has shown herself to be a stooge for the for-profit college industry. If she knowingly does the bidding of this shady racket, then she behaving reprehensibly. If she is acting on the industry's behalf out of ignorance, then she's grossly incompetent.

But her motivations don't matter. Betsy DeVos has got to go. If Trump doesn't fire her soon, then federal legislators should join in a bipartisan call for her removal. Americans deserve a competent Secretary of Education who will act in the public interest, not the interests of the venal for-profit college industry. 

References

Patricia Cohen. Betsy DeVos's Hiring of For-Profit College Official Raises Impartiality Issues, New York Time, March 17, 2017. 

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel. Trump administration rolls back protections in default on student loans. Washington Post, March 17, 2017.

Seth Frothman & Rich Williams. New data documents a disturbing cycle of defaults for struggling student-loan borrowers. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, May 15, 2017. 

Tariq Habash & Robert Shireman. How College Enrollment Contracts Limit Students' Rights. Century Foundation, April 28, 2016.

Magno v. The College Network, Inc.. (Cal. Ct. App. 2016).

Morgan v. Sanford Brown Institute, 137 A.3d 1168 (N.J. 2016).

News Release. Apollo Education Group to Eliminate Mandatory Arbitration Clauses. May 19, 2016.


Thursday, June 15, 2017

Federal court orders the Department of Education to rule on Everest College student's request for debt cancellation: Sarah Dieffenbacher v. Betsy DeVos

Dieffenbacher v. U.S. Department of Education: A Student Borrower seeks debt relief on grounds of fraud

From 2007 to 2012, Sarah Dieffenbacher attended Everest College-Ontario Metro, a for-profit college located in Ontario, California. She took out $50,000 in federal student loans to fund her studies.

In March 2015, Dieffenbacher filed a "borrower defense" application with the U.S. Department of Education, petitioning to have her loans cancelled on the grounds that Everest had engaged in fraudulent conduct in violation of California law.

In August 2015, Dieffenbacher defaulted on her loans. Educational Credit Management Corporation, her loan servicer, sent her a notice stating that it intended to begin garnishing her wages.

Dieffenbacher filed a timely objection and a request for a hearing. This objection consisted of a 29-page letter accompanied by 254 pages of exhibits. These exhibits included Diefenbacher's sworn statement and records from the California Attorney General's Office showing documented misconduct by Everest and its parent company, Corinthian Colleges.

On January 20, 2017, Dieffenbacher's attorney received a letter from the Department of Education stating that DOE was denying Dieffenbacher's objection to having her wages garnished. DOE said its decision was conclusive and that Dieffenbacher's only recourse was to file a lawsuit in federal court.

This Dieffenbacher did. In her lawsuit, Dieffenbacher claimed that DOE's decision was arbitrary and capricious and violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

Without admitting fault, DOE filed a motion to remand Dieffenbacher's case back to the Department so that its decision could be "reconsidered and re-issued in a way that would not be arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law."

Judge Virginia Phillips' decision

Last week, Judge Virginia Phillips, a California federal judge, denied DOE's request for a voluntary remand. In Judge Phillips' view, the Department "[had] not established a substantial or legitimate concern guiding its request for a remand."

The judge pointed out that Dieffenbacher's application for loan forgiveness had been pending for more than two years and that the Department had made contradictory arguments about what it intended to do.

Indeed, Judge Phillips' suggested that the Department of Education was attempting to get Dieffenbacher out of court so that it could garnish her wages. "The Department's request for remand appears to be an attempt to evade judicial review so that it can retain the ability to garnish [Dieffenbacher's] wages without a conclusive ruling as to the enforceability of her loans," the judge observed. "Under such circumstances, the remand request appears both frivolous and in bad faith" [emphasis supplied].

Judge Phillips concluded her opinion by ordering DOE to rule on Dieffenbacher's loan cancellation application within 90 days. If the Department fails to comply, the judge added, she would proceed to hear Dieffenbacher's claims on the merits.

The Dieffenbacher case: More Evidence of the Department of Education's Stall Tactics

The Dieffenbacher case is the latest example of the Department of Education's efforts to avoid dealing with student borrowers' legitimate applications for loan forgiveness.

In the Price case, which I wrote about recently, DOE took six years to rule on a University of Phoenix graduate's application for loan forgiveness based on her claim that Phoenix falsely certified that she had a high school diploma when she began her studies. Ultimately, DOE disallowed the claim. A federal court in Texas countermanded DOE's ruling and discharged the debt.

Last January, DOE sent a letter to 23,000 former students at Corinthian Colleges, assuring them that their loans had been approved for cancellation and that the loans would be forgiven within the next 60 to 120 days. Almost six months later, DOE has not kept its promise, which prompted a protest letter from 19 states' attorneys general.
So what's going on?

I think Betsy DeVos's DOE pencil pushers have added up the costs associated with discharging students loans under DOE's own rules and regulations and have found those costs to be enormous. DOE is trying to put the brakes on its administrative loan forgiveness process. The Department announced this week that it is rewriting the "borrow defense" regulations that Dieffenbacher relied on.

BUT IT IS TOO LATE. DeVos's efforts to slow down the loan forgiveness process will not withstand scrutiny in the federal courts, as the Price case and the Dieffenbacher case demonstrate.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in a recent report that eight million student borrowers are in default, with nearly 1.1 million defaulting in 2016 alone. As CFPB pointed out, people are defaulting at the rate of 2 borrowers every minute!

Two things must be done to bring the federal student loan program under control. First, the federal government must stop sending student aid dollars to for-profit colleges, which have shockingly high student-loan default rates.

Second, Congress must amend the Bankruptcy Code to allow distressed student borrowers to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy like any other unsecured consumer debt.

But Betsy DeVos's Department of Education refuses to face reality while it stalls for time. In the end, this approach is going to enrage millions of student borrowers. These borrowers are also voters, and they will vote for any politician who promises real debt relief to the legions of student borrowers who will never pay back their loans.

References


Dieffenbacher v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., ED CV 17-342-VAP (KK) (C.D. Cal. June 9, 2017).

Seth Frotman & Rich Williams. New data documents a disturbing cycle of defaults for struggling student loan borrowers. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, May 15, 2017.

Andrea Fuller. Student Debt Payback Far Worse Than BelievedWall Street Journal, January 18, 2017.

Andrew Kreighbaum. Court Orders Education Department to End Delay in Ruling on Loan Discharge. Inside Higher ED, June 9, 2017.

Andrew Kreighbaum. Education Department to hit pause on two primary Obama regulations aimed at for-profitsInside Higher ED, June 15, 2017.

Andrew Kreighbaum. State AGs Want Action on Student Loan DischargeInside Higher Ed, June 6, 2017.

Lisa Madigan, Illinois Attorney General. Letter to Betsy DeVos, US. Secretary of Education, June 5, 2017.

Price v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., 209 Fed. Supp. 3d 925 (S.D. Tex. 2016). [Link is to U.S. Magistrate's opinion, which was affirmed by a U.S. District Judge.]