Bank of America hit with $45 million punitive damages award for violating automatic stay provision of Bankruptcy Code: ECMC take notice!

A few days ago, Judge Christopher Klein, a California bankruptcy judge, struck a breathtaking blow for justice when he assessed $45 million in punitive damages against Bank of America for violating the automatic-stay provision of the Bankruptcy Code. You may recall that a Texas bankruptcy judge hit Educational Credit Management Corporation with a $74,000 punitive damages award for the same offense.

Here are the opening words of Judge Klein's Bank of America decision:

Frank Kafka lives. This automatic stay violation case reveals that he works at Bank of America. 

The mirage of promised mortgage modification lured [Erick and Renee Sundquist] into a kafkaesque nightmare of stay-violating foreclosure and unlawful detainer, tardy foreclosure rescission kept secret for months, home looted while the debtors were dispossessed, emotional distress, lost income, apparent heart attack, suicide attempt, and post-traumatic stress disorder for all of which Bank of America disclaims responsibility. 

Judge Klein then detailed Bank of America's offenses in detail--his opinion is 107 pages long! And at the end, Judge Klein spelled out how the punitive damages award should be apportioned:

The actual . . . damages are $1,074,581.50. The appropriate . . . punitive damages are $45,000,000.00.
The Sundquists are enjoined to deliver $40,000,000 (minus applicable taxes) to public service entities that are important in education in consumer law and deliver of legal services to consumers: National Consumer Law Center ($10,000,000.00), National Consumer Bankruptcy Rights Center ($10,000,000.00), and the five public law schools of the University of California System ($4,000,000.00).

Of course, Bank of America will appeal Judge Klein's punitive damages award, and who knows how that will go. But regardless of what happens on appeal, Judge Klein has turned a glaring spotlight on Bank of America's outrageous behavior.

And if the damages award is upheld, money will flow to entities that can help distressed debtors fight the predatory tactics of the banks.  That would be a great blessing for American society.

And this brings me to Educational Credit Management Corporation, the predatory student-loan debt collector that violated the automatic stay provision of the Bankruptcy Code more than 30 times by repeatedly garnishing the wages of Kristin Bruner-Halteman, a student-loan debtor who worked for Starbucks.  In a 2016 decision, Judge Harlin DeWayne Hale, a Texas bankruptcy judge, awarded Bruner-Halteman $74,000 in punitive damages for ECMC's misbehavior.

But $74,000 is a pittance for ECMC; it probably has that much cash in loose change that slipped under its couch cushions.  According to a report by the Century Foundation, ECMC has $1 billion in unrestricted assets. That's billion with a B.

So--listen up distressed student-loan debtors. If you file for bankruptcy in  a case opposed by ECMC and ECMC violates the Bankruptcy Code's automatic stay provision as it did in the Bruner-Halteman case, you need to ask for several million dollars in punitive damages. How about $10 million--that's only one percent of ECMC's assets.

References

Bruner-Halteman v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, Case No. 12-324-HDH-13, ADV. No. 14-03041 (Bankr. N.D. Tex. 2016).

Robert Shireman and Tariq Habash. Have Student Loan Guaranty Agencies Lost Their Way? The Century Foundation, September 29, 2016. Accessible at https://tcf.org/content/report/student-loan-guaranty-agencies-lost-way/

Sundquist v. Bank of America,  Adv. Pro. No. 204-0228, Case No. 10-35624-B-13J (Bankr. E.D. Calif. March 23, 2017).

Student Loan Debt Collector accused of violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act; Brandon v. Eaton Group Attorneys

Unscrupulous debt collection practices: Economic exploitation of struggling student-loan debtors

Susan Browmmiller, in her classic book on rape, observed that rape victims are often assaulted twice. First, they are physically raped by their attacker; and then they are psychologically raped by the justice system when they testify against the rapist in a brutal and humiliating criminal trial.

Something similar can be said about student-loan debtors. Millions of unsophisticated young people have been enticed to take out student loans to enroll in academic programs that don't lead to good jobs. That's rape number 1.

Then when these duped individuals are unable to pay back their student loans, they fall into the hands of the unscrupulous debt collectors. That's rape number 2.

Brandon v. Eaton Group Attorneys: Law firm accused of violating Fair Debt Collection Practices Act

Last January, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled in a case brought by Cassandra Brandon against Eaton Group Attorneys (Eaton), a law firm representing National Collegiate Student Loan Trust (NCSLT), a student-loan debt collector. Eaton had sued Brandon on NCSLT's behalf, alleging that Brandon had defaulted on her student loans and owed NCSLT about $46,000.

After the lawsuit was filed, an agent for Eaton sent Brandon a letter, which was described as a "REQUEST FOR PAYMENT ARRANGEMENTS." And this is what the letter said:

Dear CASSANDRA PLUMMER [Plummer is Brandon's maiden name]: 

If you would like to explore a voluntary repayment plan, then please provide the requested information. The debt will need to be acknowledged through the attached consent judgment. Please return these forms as soon as possible. This is a communication from a debt collector. This is an attempt to collect a debt. Any information will be used for that purpose.

Accompanying the letter was a partially completed consent judgment, which stated:

IT IS ORDERED, ADJUDGED, AND DECREED that judgment be rendered in favor of Plaintiff, NATIONAL COLLEGIATE LOAN TRUST 2007-1, and against the defendant, CASSANDRA PLUMMER . . ., in the full sum of $41,115.13, together with accrued interest of $4,998.37, and additional interest of 4% from date of judgment, and for all costs of these proceedings, subject to a credit of $0.00.

Brandon then sued Eaton Group Attorneys in federal court, charging the law firm with violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA).  Basically, Brandon accused the law firm of sending her a deceptive debt-collection letter in violation of the FDCPA.

Eaton moved for summary judgment on Brandon's claim, arguing that its letter was "non-deceitful as a matter of law." But Judge Sarah Vance denied the law firm's motion and allowed Brandon to proceed with her suit.

Judge Vance began her analysis by summarizing the purpose of the FDCPA, which is to eliminate "abusive, deceptive, and unfair debt collection practices . . ." The law prohibits debt collectors from using any "false, deceptive, or misleading representation or means in connection with the collection of any debt," and it bars debt collectors from using "unfair or unconscionable means" to collect on a debt.

In the court's view;

[The] letter [Brandon] received was misleading because an unsuspecting debtor, seeking only to 'explore a voluntary repayment plan,' could be fooled into executing the consent judgment without knowledge of the consequences. Specifically, an unsophisticated debtor may not know that the consent judgment will serve to waive potentially valid defenses and may facilitate a wage garnishment order" [Emphasis supplied]

By telling Brandon she must formally acknowledge her debt before she could even "explore" voluntary repayment plan, the Eaton Group Attorneys was basically inviting her to "inadvertently dig herself into a deeper hole." (Internal citation omitted).

Congress needs to clean up the student-loan debt collection industry

Laws are already on the books that ban unfair debt collection activities. Brandon sued Eaton Group Attorneys under the FDCPA; and Navient Solutions and Student Assistance Corporation had a judgment assessed against them last spring for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

But more needs to be done.

Specifically, Congress needs to hold hearings on the activities of the student loan guaranty agencies--and Educational Credit Management Corporation in particular. A Texas bankruptcy judge slapped ECMC with punitive damages last year for repeatedly violating the automatic stay provision of the Bankruptcy Code, but the penalty was entirely too light for such a wealthy corporation.

And Congress needs to eliminate the excessive penalties--25 percent or more--that debt collectors assess on student-loan debtors in default.  After all, it is the penalties and accrued interest that are driving millions of struggling student-loan debtors into 20- and 25-year income driven repayment plans.

Republicans and Democrats could bring relief to millions of overwhelmed student-loan debtors if they just joined together to pass meaningful reform legislation.  If our nation's politicians can't cooperate in a bipartisan effort to clean up the student loan program, then shame on all of them.

References

Brandon v. Eaton Group Attorneys, CA No. 16-13747 (E.D. La. Jan. 24, 2017).

Bruner-Halteman v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, Case No. 12-324-HDH-13, ADV. No. 14-03041 (Bankr. N.D. Tex. 2016).

McCaskill v. Navient Solutions, Inc., No. 8:15-cv-1559-T-33TBM (M.D. Fla. April 6, 2016).

Robert Shireman and Tariq Habash. Have Student Loan Guaranty Agencies Lost Their Way? The Century Foundation, September 29, 2016. Accessible at https://tcf.org/content/report/student-loan-guaranty-agencies-lost-way/

Student Debtors and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Trump needs to strengthen the CFPB, not weaken it

Last January, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Navient Corporation, a student-loan debt collector, accusing the company of "systematically and illegally failing borrowers at every stage of repayment."

According to CFPB Director Richard Cordray, Navient cheated student borrowers by making it more difficult for them to pay back their college loans. "At every stage of repayment, Navient chose to shortcut and deceive consumers to save on operating costs," Cordray charged. "Too many borrowers paid more for their loans because Navient illegally cheated them , , , "

Specifically, the CFPB accused Navient of these illegal practices:

• Failing to correctly apply and allocate borrowers' payments to their student-loan accounts. "Navient repeatedly misapplies and misallocates payments--often making the same error multiple times,"  the CFPB alleged. And all too often, Navient would not correct its errors unless a borrower discovered the problem and brought it to Navient's attention.

• Giving struggling borrowers bad advice about student-loan repayment options.  The CFPB also accused Navient of steering student debtors toward costly forbearance options when they were having trouble making their monthly loan payments. These options give borrowers a break from making their payments, but the interest continues to accrue during forbearance. CFPB believes Navient should have helped borrowers get into income-driven repayment plans (IDRs) that would lower their monthly payments instead of encouraging them to apply for forbearances.

• "Obscur[ing] information" borrowers needed to remain in income-driven repayment plans. The CFPB also said Navient failed to adequately inform borrowers about what they need to do to maintain their eligibility for income-driven repayment plans. Once borrowers enter those plans, their monthly payments are determined by their annual income; but to remain eligible, borrowers must recertify their income every calendar year. Apparently, a lot of borrowers in IDRs do not know they are required to recertify their income on an annual basis.

As the New York Times said in an editorial, CFPB's charges against Navient "have the ring of truth." Without question, student borrowers who opt to skip loan payments temporarily under  a government-approved forbearance plan see their loan balances grow dramatically due to accruing interest, which accelerates their descent into default. And it seems evident that people in income-driven repayment plans don't understand what they need to do to maintain their eligibility; half the people who enroll in IDRs get kicked out of them for failing to recertify their income on an annual basis.

The student-loan debt collectors are hoping President Trump will dismantle or cripple the CFPB, which would prevent the agency from bringing lawsuits like the one it brought against Navient. And perhaps he will.

But I am hoping the Trump administration  surprises the corporate fat cats and throws its full support behind CFPB's lawsuit against Navient.  Indeed, the CFPB needs to become a lot more aggressive.

In my view, the CFPB should investigate the student loan guaranty agencies that are making a fortune in the student-loan collection business. As the Century Foundation reported last year, four of these agencies have amassed $ 1 billion apiece through servicing and collecting student loans.

Educational Credit Management Corporation, which holds a billion dollars in unrestricted assets, is particularly ruthless. Just last year, a federal bankruptcy judge assessed punitive damages against ECMC for repeatedly violating the automatic stay provision of the Bankruptcy Code by garnishing the wages of a Starbucks employee more than 30 times after she filed for bankruptcy in an effort to collect on a defaulted student loan.

In short, there is a lot for the CFPB to do, and the Navient lawsuit is only a small step in the right direction. It would be a tragedy if the corporate interests defanged the CFPB, which is only now getting serious about protecting student-loan debtors from abuse.

Richard Cordray, CFPB Director
photo credit: Getty Images

References

Bruner-Halteman v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, Case No. 12-324-HDH-13, ADV. No. 14-03041 (Bankr. N.D. Tex. 2016).

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. CFPB Sues Nation's Largest Student Loan Company Navient for Failing Borrowers at Every Stage of Repayment. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Press Release, January 18, 2017.

Robert Shireman and Tariq Habash. Have Student Loan Guaranty Agencies Lost Their Way? The Century Foundation, September 29, 2016. Accessible at https://tcf.org/content/report/student-loan-guaranty-agencies-lost-way/

Bob Sullivan. Will a Trump presidency lead to more predatory lending? Market Watch, January 18, 2017.

Unfairly Squeezing Student Borrowers. New York Times, February 4, 2017.

Dear Secretary Betsy DeVos: Please do the right thing and allow distressed debtors to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy

Dear Secretary DeVos:

You have been Secretary of Education for about  a month, so you know the federal student loan program is in shambles.

Eight million borrowers are in default, millions more aren't making payments while interest accrues on their debt, 5.6 million people have signed up for income-driven repayment plans and are making payments so small that their debt is negatively amortizing even though they are faithfully making regular payments.

Obviously, there are dozens of things the Department of Education can do to address this crisis, but you can easily do one thing to help alleviate mass suffering and it is this: Please direct DOE and all its student-loan debt collectors to stop opposing bankruptcy relief for distressed student-loan borrowers.

In 2015, Deputy Secretary Lynn Mahaffie issued a letter stating DOE and its debt collectors would not oppose bankruptcy relief for student-loan debtors if it made no economic sense to do so. But in fact, both the Department and its agents oppose bankruptcy relief in almost every case.

And here are just a few examples:

• In Myhre v. U.S. Department of Education, the Department opposed bankruptcy relief for a quadriplegic who worked full time but could not make student-loan payments and still pay the full-time caregiver he needed to dress him, feed him, and drive him to work.

• In Abney v. U.S. Department of Education,  DOE urged a bankruptcy court to put a destitute student borrower into a long term payment plan even though the debtor was living on $1200 a month and was so poor he could not afford to drive a car and was riding a bicycle to work.

• In Roth v. Educational Credit Management, ECMC fought an elderly woman's efforts to shed her student loans even though the woman had a monthly income of less than $800 a month and suffered from several chronic health problems.

• In Edwards v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, ECMC argued to an Arizona bankruptcy judge that a 56-year-old counselor who owed $245,000 in student loans should be put in a 25-year repayment plan whereby she would make token payments until she was 81 years old!

Some of these cases were decided before Mahaffie's 2015 letter and some were decided after, but the dates are immaterial. DOE and its agents almost always oppose bankruptcy relief for student-loan debtors, no matter how desperate their circumstances.

In fact, DOE's position is essentially this: NO STUDENT DEBTOR IS ENTITLED TO BANKRUPTCY RELIEF. Instead, everyone should be placed in income-driven repayment plan  (IDR) that can last for 20 or even 25 years.

But you could change DOE's position simply by signing your name to a single letter. That letter should say that DOE and its debt collectors will no longer oppose bankruptcy relief for student debtors who cannot pay back their college loans and still maintain a minimal standard of living. And DOE will no longer argue that IDRs are a reasonable alternative to bankruptcy relief.

If you did that, hundreds of thousands of insolvent college-loan borrowers could discharge their student debt in bankruptcy and get a fresh start--a fresh start the bankruptcy courts were established to provide.

Your advisers may argue that the IDR program offers college borrowers a reasonable way to ultimately pay off their student loans, but that's not true. Do you think Rita Edwards would have ever paid back the $245,000 she owed the government by making payments of $81 a month in an IDR as ECMC proposed in her bankruptcy case? Of course not.

Do you think Janet Roth would have ever paid back her student-loan debt of $90,000 if she had been put in an IDR that would have set her monthly payments at zero due to her low income? No, and it was absurd for ECMC to have made that argument in Roth's bankruptcy case.

The stark reality is this. Millions of student borrowers have seen their loan balances double, triple and even quadruple due default fees and accruing interest. Putting these people into 20 and 25-year repayment plans that only require them to make token payments is insane.

Secretary DeVos, you could eliminate so much suffering if you would simply write a letter stating that DOE will no longer oppose bankruptcy relief for people like Myhre, Edwards, Roth, Abney and millions of other people in similar circumstances who will never pay back their student loans.

Please do the right thing.

References

Abney v. U.S. Department of Education, 540 B.R. 681 (Bankr. W.D. Mo. 2015).

Annual Report of the CFPB Student Loan Ombudsman. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, September 2016.

Ann Carrns. How to Dig Out of Student Loan Default. New York Times, October 21, 2016.

Rohit Chopra. A closer look at the trillion. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, August 5, 2013.

Edwards v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, Adversary No.. 3:15-ap-26-PS, 2016 WL 1317421 (Bankr. D. Ariz. March 31, 2016).

Lynn Mahaffie, Undue Hardship Discharge of Title IV Loans in Bankruptcy Adversary Proceedings. CL ID: GEN 15-13, July 7, 2015.

Myhe v. U.S. Department of Education, 503 B.R. 698 (Bankr. W.D. Wis. 2013).

Roth v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, 490 B.R. 908 (9th Cir. BAP 2013). Available at http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/bap/2013/04/16/RothV%20ECMC%20opinion-FINAL%20AZ-11-1233.pdf

Matt Sessa. Federal Student Aid Posts Updated Reports to FSA Data Center. U.S. Department of Education Office of Student Aid, December 20, 2016.

Congressional Democrats should pressure DeVos to clean up the student-loan collection business

Democrats are critical of Betsy DeVos, President Trump's new Secretary of Education, but one concern is particularly valid, which is this: DeVos has business ties with a student-loan debt collector.

Those ties, which were explained in a Washington Post article are complicated. Here is what the Post said:

Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos and her husband have extensive financial holdings through their private investment and management firm, RDV Corporation. . . .

RDV is affiliated with LMF Portfolio, a limited liability corporation listed in regulatory filings as one of several firms involved in a $147 million loan to Performant Financial Corp., a debt collection agency in business with the Education Department.

Twenty-three percent of Performant's revenue is directly tied to its dealings with the Education Department, which had 14 contracts worth more than $20 million with the company in fiscal 2016.

According to the Post, Performant lost a recent contract bid with the Department of Education and is protesting DOE's decision with the Government Accountability Office.

DeVos's complicated ties with a student-loan debt college company is a legitimate worry to Democrats because as Secretary of Education, "DeVos would be in a position to influence the award of debt collection, servicing and recovery contracts, in addition to the oversight and monitoring of the contracts." In addition, the Post article points out, DeVos will also "have the authority to revise payments and fees to contractors for rehabilitating past-due debt--all of which has Senate Democrats concerned."

Senator Elizabeth Warren criticized DeVos because DeVos has no experience in higher education. "As Education Secretary," Warren charged, "Betsy DeVos would be in charge of running a $1 trillion student loan bank. She has no experience doing that." In fact, Warren correctly observed, "Betsy DeVos has no experience with student loans, Pell Grants, or public education at all."

Like Senator Warren, most Senate Democrats senators opposed DeVos to be Secretary of Education primarily on the ground that she has no experience in higher education, which is true. But I think a bigger concern is the fear that DeVos won't regulate the for-profit college industry aggressively and that she won't monitor the government's debt collectors, including the student loan guaranty agencies, which have a ruthless record of collection activities against distressed student loan debtors.

I confess I did not take DeVos's ties with a debt collection agency into consideration during the nomination process. I thought, perhaps naively, that DeVos's lack of experience in higher education might be a plus, since she could look at the student loan program with fresh eyes.

And perhaps she will. But the Democrats can smoke her out by moving aggressively for transparency and an accounting in the student-loan collection business and calling for a reduction in the collection fees and penalties the debt collectors are slapping on defaulted student loans.

Senator Warren could lead the charge by holding hearings on the activities of the student loan guaranty agencies: Educational Credit Management Corporation and the others. The Century Foundation reported that four of these agencies, which are nonprofit organizations, each hold $1 billion in assets.

If Secretary DeVos does not move aggressively to rein in the for-profits and clean up the debt collection business, then the Democrats will have a legitimate charge against her. The best way to see how DeVos will handle her new responsibilities is to hold hearings and introduce legislation to clean up the student loan industry.

If DeVos opposes legitimate calls for reforming the federal student loan program, then the Democrats are right about her.

References

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel. Dems raise concern about links between DeVos and debt collection agency. Washington Post, January 17, 2017. 

Eugene Scott. Warren grills DeVos: 'I don't see how she can be the Secretary of Education.' CNN, January 18, 2017.

Robert Shireman and Tariq Habash. Have Student Loan Guaranty Agencies Lost Their Way? The Century Foundation, September 29, 2016. Accessible at https://tcf.org/content/report/student-loan-guaranty-agencies-lost-way/

Educational Credit Management Corporation is a bad actor: Rafael Pardo's article about ECMC's litigation misbehavior

In recent blogs, I discussed two cases in which Educational Credit Management Corporation, the Department of Education's most ruthless student-loan debt collector, was sanctioned by a court for misbehavior. In the Bruner-Halteman case, a Texas bankruptcy judge assessed punitive damages against ECMC for garnishing the wages of a bankrupt Starbucks employee in violation of the Bankruptcy Code's automatic stay provision. The judge awarded Ms. Bruner-Halteman $74,000 in punitive damages--$2,000 for each of the 37 times ECMC wrongly garnished her wages.

In the Hann case, the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld sanctions against ECMC for trying to collect on a student loan debt in spite of the fact that a federal bankruptcy judge had ruled that the debt had been paid.

Are these isolated cases of misbehavior? No they are not. In 2014, Rafael Pardo published an article in the University of Florida Law Review that documents how often ECMC's attorneys engage in "pollutive litigation" in cases against hapless bankrupt student-loan debtors.

Pardo's article is long (77 pages) and a bit dense and technical (477 footnotes).  I will limit my discussion of his impressive essay to a few of the highlights:

Failure to file corporate ownership statement

The Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure require corporate parties in adversary proceedings to file a "corporate ownership statement" that identifies any corporate party that directly or indirectly owns 10 percent or more of the corporate party's equity interests. According to Pardo's analysis of a random sample of cases, ECMC failed to file its corporate ownership statement 81 percent of the time during 2011 and 2012.

What is the significance of ECMC's noncompliance This is what Pardo said:

The significance of such procedural noncompliance is that, in the overwhelming majority of these adversary proceedings, ECMC has failed to provide the presiding judge with the information necessary to determine whether [the judge] has a financial interest in ECMC that would warrant self-disqualification. Even assuming that ECMC would not have had to report any entity in the corporate ownership statement if ECMC had been procedurally compliant, the failure to file the statement casts a cloud on the legitimacy of the outcomes of proceedings that ended favorably for ECMC. (p. 2149)

Motion Practice 

Pardo also documented incidents when ECMC failed to abide by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in its motion practice.  First, in some adversary proceedings a student-loan debtor fails to name ECMC as a defendant, probably because the debtor did not know the name of the correct party to sue. In such cases, ECMC is required to state with particularity that the debtor's student-loan debt has been assigned to ECMC and that it is the proper party to litigate whether the debt is dischargeable.

Pardo found that ECMC often asserted itself as the proper party in an adversary proceeding without filing the appropriate representations about its interests. First, Pardo found that in 9.2 percent of a random sample of cases, ECMC didn't file any motion to become a named party; it simply entered into the litigation as if it had been named in the student-debtor's complaint. (p. 2153)

Furthermore, when ECMC did file a motion to join the litigation, the motion contained a substantive deficiency 80 percent of the time (in the cases Pardo examined).  Deficiencies included failing to allege assignment of the loan, failure to provide documentation of a loan's assignment, and failure to indicate which of the Federal Rules entitled it to be granted relief.

One might respond to Pardo's findings with a yawning so-what, but as Pardo pointed out, "Such procedural noncompliance is significant because it calls into question the legitimacy of a court's decision to allow a movant who may not have a valid basis to join the litigation" (p. 2153). Moreover, the fact that bankruptcy courts have allowed ECMC to get away with these procedural violations suggests that the courts aren't looking closely enough to determine whether ECMC has the right to insert itself into a student-debtor's adversary proceeding.

Responsive-Pleading Practice

Pardo's research found that student debtors named ECMC as a named defendant about 24 percent of the time. In such cases, ECMC filed an improper response in about one case out of four. (p. 256)

In the majority of the cases Pardo examined, the debtor did not name ECMC as a defendant. In those cases, ECMC was required to file a motion to intervene on the grounds that it was the proper named party. In the cases Pardo reviewed, ECMC filed an improper response 89 percent of the time. For example, ECMC would sometimes answer a student debtor's complaint before it had served its motion to intervene.

How these irregularities affects a student-debtor's interest is a bit complicated, and I invite you to read Pardo's discussion on that issue. But it is remarkable, in my view, that ECMC, a sophisticated debt collector, fails to abide by the Federal Rules of Procedure on so many occasions.

Discovery Practice

Pardo also found significant rules violation in ECMC's discovery practices. In particular, Pardo found a case in which ECMC moved for summary judgment based on a student debtor's deemed admissions even though ECMC had wrongly asked the debtor to admit to a conclusion of law.

In my mind, ECMC engages in serious misconduct when it formally asks a bankrupt student-loan debtor to admit to conclusions of law--especially an unsophisticated debtors who is not represented by an attorney.  Not only are such requests impermissible under the Federal Rules, but student debtors may not know that; and they may also not know that an unanswered Request for Admission is deemed to be admitted.

Conclusion: ECMC engages in "pollutive litigation" and it uses taxpayer's money to do so

Pardo characterized ECMC's bankruptcy-case behavior as "pollutive litigation," and that's putting the matter mildly. ECMC gets reimbursed by the federal government for its attorney fees--fees that are often spent harassing unsophisticated debtors who do not even have lawyers.

Moreover, ECMC frequently wears student debtors down just by prolonging the litigation. Janet Roth, for example, an elderly woman living on Social Security income of less than $800 a month, filed for bankruptcy in January 2009. Her case was not concluded until April 2013, more than four years later.

There are a lot of things Congress can do to clean up the student-loan mess and bring relief to millions of suffering student debtors. But shutting down ECMC would be a big step in the right direction.

The Department of Education Should Shut This Bad Boy Down.

References

Bruner-Halteman v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, Case No. 12-324-HDH-13, ADV. No. 14-03041 (Bankr. N.D. Tex. 2016).

Hann v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, 711 F.3d 235 (1st Cir. 2013).

John Hechinger. Taxpayers Fund $454,000 Pay for Collector Chasing Student Loans. Bloomberg.com, May 15, 2013. Accessible at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-15/taxpayers-fund-454-000-pay-for-collector-chasing-student-loans.html

Natalie Kitroeff. Loan Monitor is Accused of Ruthless Tactics on Student Debt. New York Times, January 1, 2014. Acccessible at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/us/loan-monitor-is-accused-of-ruthless-tactics-on-student-debt.html?_r=0

Rafael Pardo. The Undue Hardship Thicket: On Access to Justice, Procedural Noncompliance and Pollutive Litigation in Bankruptcy. 66 Florida Law Review 2101-2178.

Roth v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, 490 B.R. 908 (9th Cir. BAP 2013). 

Robert Shireman and Tariq Habash. Have Student Loan Guaranty Agencies Lost Their Way? The Century Foundation, September 29, 2016. Accessible at https://tcf.org/content/report/student-loan-guaranty-agencies-lost-way/

A Texas bankruptcy court slaps ECMC with punitive damages for repeatedly garnishing a Starbucks employee's paychecks in violation of the automatic stay provision: "The Ragged Edge"

Anyone who has dealt with Educational Credit Management Corporation as a debtor knows that it is a ruthless and heartless organization. As one of the federal government's student-loan debt collectors, it has harassed hapless creditors thousands of time. It was ECMC that opposed bankruptcy relief for Janet Roth, an elderly woman with chronic health problems who was living on less than $800 a month.

But the Roth case does not fully display ECMC's callousness.  A better illustration of its merciless behavior is found in Bruner-Halteman v. ECMC, decided by a Texas bankruptcy court last April.

Bruner-Halteman was a single mother who worked at Starbucks, living, as the bankruptcy court observed, "on the ragged edge where any adversity can be catastrophic." She owed about $5,000 on a student loan issued by Sallie Mae, and she was in default.

In 2012, ECMC garnished Bruner-Halteman's  Starbucks wages, and she filed for bankruptcy, which, under federal law, triggers an automatic stay of all garnishment activities. ECMC received notice of the bankruptcy filing, and even participated as a creditor in Bruner-Halteman's bankruptcy proceedings. But it continued to garnish Bruner-Halteman's wages for almost two years.

In fact, ECMC garnished Bruner-Halteman's wages 37 times AFTER she filed for bankruptcy--a clear violation of the law. Moreover, ECMC had no reasonable excuse for its misbehavior. In fact, ECMC refunded the wages it garnished on 17 occasions but kept on garnishing this poor woman's wages. Indeed, the garnishments did not stop until Bruner-Halteman  filed a lawsuit for damages in the bankruptcy court.

The bankruptcy court held a three-day trial on Bruner-Haltman's claims and heard plenty of evidence about the stress Bruner-Halteman experienced due to ECMC's illegal garnishments.  On April 8, 2016, the court awarded her actual damages of  about $8,000, attorney fees, and $74,000 in punitive damages.

Here is how the bankruptcy judge summarized ECMC's conduct:

ECMC's systematic, knowing, and willful disregard of the automatic stay and the protections afforded a debtor by the bankruptcy system was particularly egregious and offends the integrity of the the bankruptcy process. . . The indifference shown by ECMC to the Plaintiff and the bankruptcy process is gravely disturbing.

The court was particularly offended by the fact that ECMC repeatedly refunded the amounts it garnished but did not stop the garnishment process. "The callousness of the refund process is particularly rattling," the court wrote.

"In order to process a refund," the court noted, "an ECMC employee had to make the determination that the debtor had an active bankruptcy case, but that did nothing to convince ECMC that it should be cancelling the wage garnishments . . ." Instead, ECMC processed the refunds "at whatever pace it chose" while Bruner-Halteman "was doing everything she could to make ends meet."

At the conclusion of its opinion, the court summarized ECMC's behavior as follows:

A sophisticated creditor, ECMC, active in many cases in this district and across the country, decided that it could continue to garnish a debtor's wages with full knowledge that she was in a pending bankruptcy case. The Plaintiff, a woman who suffers from a severe medical condition, was hurt in the process. She was deprived of the full use of her paycheck. She incurred significant attorneys' fees in trying to fix the situation. A garnishment of a few hundred dollars may not be much to everyone, but to Kristin Bruner-Halteman, it meant a lot.

I will make just two comments about ECMC's merciless and cruel behavior in the Bruner-Halteman case. First, $74,000 might be a significant punitive-damages award for some organizations, but 74 grand is peanuts to ECMC.  After all, the Century Foundation reported recently that ECMC, a nonprofit organization, has $1 billion in cash and unrestricted assets. A punitive damages award of a million dollars would have been more appropriate.

Second, Ms. Bruner-Halteman was not awarded damages for ECMC's outlaw conduct until April 8, 2016, almost exactly four years after ECMC's first  wrongful garnishment.  Obviously, ECMC knows how to stretch out the litigatin process  to wear down its adversaries.

ECMC's name has appeared as a named party in more than 500 court decisions. A little dust-up like the one it had with Bruner-Haltemann is simply the price of doing business in the dirty commerce of harassing student-loan defaulters. And you can bet no one at ECMC missed a meal or lost any sleep because of the Bruner-Halteman case.

Perhaps Senator Elizabeth Warren, who publicly bemoans the excesses of the student loan industry, should hold Senate hearings and ask ECMC's CEO a few questions. Questions like: How much do ECMC executives pay themselves? How did ECMC accumulate $1 billion in unrestricted assets? And who is paying ECMC's attorney fees for hounding all those American student-loan borrowers--millions of whom, like Bruner-Halteman, are living "on the ragged edge"?

References

Bruner-Halteman v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, Case No. 12-324-HDH-13, ADV. No. 14-03041 (Bankr. N.D. Tex. 2016).

Robert Shireman and Tariq Habash. Have Student Loan Guaranty Agencies Lost Their Way? The Century Foundation, September 29, 2016. Accessible at https://tcf.org/content/report/student-loan-guaranty-agencies-lost-way/

Betsy DeVos, Trump's choice for Secretary of Education, has the power to ease the suffering of student-loan debtors

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump's choice for Secretary of Education, has no experience in higher education, and that may be a good thing for student-loan debtors.

Most commentators on the student-loan crisis are insiders who want to maintain the status quo regarding the federal student loan program. The universities depend on regular infusions of student-loan money, which enables them to raise their tuition prices year after year at twice the rate of inflation.

But DeVos has no ties to higher education at all, and thus she has the capacity to look at the student-loan catastrophe from a fresh perspective. In fact, DeVos has the power to do one simple thing that could potentially bring relief to millions of distressed student-loan debtors.

Under current bankruptcy law, debtors cannot discharge their student loans in bankruptcy unless they can show that repaying the loans will cause them "undue hardship."  In nearly every case, the Department of Education and the student-loan guaranty companies argue that student-loan debtors should be denied bankruptcy relief under the undue hardship standard.

Instead, they routinely demand that distressed college borrowers enroll in long-term income-based repayment plans that can last for 20 or even 25 years.  And DOE and its debt collectors make this demand even when debtors' income is so low that they pay nothing or next to nothing under the terms of these plans.

Here are some examples:

• In the Edwards case, decided last spring, Educational Credit Management (ECMC) argued that Rita Gail Edwards, a woman in her mid-50s, should pay $56 a month for 25 years to service a debt of almost a quarter of a million dollars! 

• In the Roth case, ECMC opposed bankruptcy relief for Janet Roth, an elderly woman with chronic health problems who was living on Social Security income of less than $800 a month. Instead, ECMC wanted Roth to enter a long-term repayment plan even though ECMC conceded that Roth's income was so low that she would pay nothing under the plan. 

• In the Abney case, DOE wanted Abney, a 40-year-old father of two, to enter a 25-year income-based repayment plan. Abney was living on $1200 a month and was so poor he couldn't afford a car and rode a bicycle to get to his job.

In essence, DOE and the debt collectors maintain that almost no one is entitled to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy and that everyone should be placed in long-term, income based repayment plans.

What if Secretary DeVos simply decreed that DOE and the loan guaranty agencies will stop pushing long-term repayment plans in the bankruptcy courts and would consent to bankruptcy discharges for people like Roth, Edwards, and Abney? (Incidentally, in all three cases, the bankruptcy courts rejected the creditors' arguments and discharged the student loans in their entirety.)

By consenting to bankruptcy discharges for people like Abney, Edwards and Roth, the Department of Education would signal to the bankruptcy courts that it supports a less harsh interpretation of the "undue hardship" standard. That would open the door for thousands of people of distressed debtors to file bankruptcy to discharge their student loans.

Some people might argue that my proposal would unleash a flood of bankruptcy filings that would undermine the financial integrity of the federal student loan program. But let's face facts. People like Roth, Edwards and Abney would never have paid back their student loans, and placing them in 25-year repayment plans that would have obligated them to make token payments that would have done nothing more than maintain the cynical fiction that their loans weren't in default.

Wouldn't it be better for DOE to be candid about the student-loan crisis and admit that millions of people will never pay back their loans? Wouldn't it be better public policy to allow honest but unfortunate debtors to get the fresh start that the bankruptcy courts are intended to provide?

Betsy DeVos is fresh on the scene of the student-loan catastrophe. Let's hope she brings some fresh thinking to the U.S. Department of Education.

Mark http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/us/politics/donald-trump-president-elect.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=RelatedCoverage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article

Educational Credit Management Corporation and the U.S. Department of Education: Are They Co-Conspirators in Accounting Fraud?

Last March, an Arizona bankruptcy court discharged $245,000 in student loan debt owed by  Rita Gail Edwards, a 56-year-old single woman earning a tenuous living as a counselor. Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC), her student-loan creditor, fought the discharge. ECMC wanted Edwards placed in a 25-year income-based repayment plan. Under such a plan, Edwards would only pay $84 a month on her loans for 25 years.

ECMC's position was absurd, of course. A woman in her late 50s  will never pay off a $245,000 loan by making monthly payments of $84. The only possible purpose that is served by jamming Ms. Edwards into a 25-year repayment plan is to carry her student-loan debt on the Department of Education's books as a performing loan.

In ruling for Ms. Edwards, the bankruptcy judge questioned the wisdom of a system that allowed Edwards to borrow so much money. "In hindsight, it is a shame that [Edwards] ever incurred these student loan debts," the court observed.

While her Ottawa University education may have given her the tools and credentials to work in an emotionally satisfying role [as a counselor] and may have provided a well needed skilled counselor in her rural community, the predictable economic burden was never likely to justify the massive economic burden she incurred.

The Edwards case demonstrates the insanity of the federal student-loan program. Our government allows people to borrow extravagant amounts of money for educational programs that will never pay off, and then it engages debt collectors to push borrowers into long-term income-based repayment plans that stretch out over 25 years and will almost never result in the loans being repaid.

And the Edwards case is not an anomaly. In the Roth case, ECMC opposed a bankruptcy discharge for an elderly woman with chronic health problems who was living on less than $800 a month. In fact, Roth's income was so low that ECMC acknowledged that Roth's monthly payments under an income-based repayment plan would be zero!

In the Halverson case, ECMC opposed a discharge for a man in his sixties making less than $14 an hour as a substitute teacher and who owed almost $300,000 in student loan debt. Mr. Halverson borrowed less than half the amount he owed when he filed bankruptcy and was never in default. His debt ballooned mostly due to accruing interest while his loans were in deferment.

The Department of Education itself has taken the same irrational stance regarding bankruptcy discharge for student debtors. In the Myhre case, DOE opposed a discharge for a quadriplegic, and in the Abney case, it opposed a discharge for  a single father of two children who was living on less than $1200 a month and could not even afford to own a car.

Why?

 I can think of only one reason. ECMC and DOE are engaged in a massive accounting fraud, trying to convince the public that the federal student loan program is solvent and fiscally sound. But in fact the student loan program is a disaster. Eight million people are in default and and one out of four debtors are either in default or behind on their loan payments.

ECMC benefits from the status quo--that is clear. According to a Century Foundation report, it has $1 billion in unrestricted assets, most of it obtained from its loan-collection activities. The Westlaw database shows that ECMC has  appeared as a named party in over 500 federal court rulings; it has spent literally millions of dollars in attorney fees chasing after people like Gail Edwards and Janet Roth.

And who pays those fees?  According to a law review article written by Rafael Pardo, ECMC draws money from a Federal Reserve Fund to finance its loan-collection activities and has access to "significant [federal] resources when litigating against student-loan debtors" (p. 2145).  Pardo cites a document showing that DOE allowed ECMC to keep a quarter of a billion dollars that it drew from DOE's Federal Reserve Fund to finance its activities in 2008 (p. 2145).

So you, Mr. & Ms American taxpayer, are paying ECMC to engage in unproductive litigation against impoverished debtors--litigation intended to keep the student-loan crisis under wraps.

And ECMC is a nonprofit organization--supposedly devoted to the public good.

But ECMC is not acting for the public good. On the contrary, ECMC is DOE's hit man--the entity DOE sends to beat down bankrupt student debtors and prevent them from getting the bankruptcy relief they deserve.

 ECMC's senior executives are getting well paid to be DOE's "Mac the Knife."  Its CEO makes at least a million dollars a year.

References

Annual Report of the CFPB Student Loan Ombudsman. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, September 2016. Available at http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/102016_cfpb_Transmittal_DFA_1035_Student_Loan_Ombudsman_Report.pdf

Edwards v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, Adversary No.. 3:15-ap-26-PS, 2016 WL 1317421 (Bankr. D. Ariz. March 31, 2016). Available at http://www.azb.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions/024139558300_dmd.pdf

In re: Halverson, 401 B.R. 378 (Bankr. D. Minn. 2009).

Rafael Pardo. The Undue Hardship Thicket: On Access to Justice, Procedural Noncompliance and Pollutive Litigation in Bankruptcy. 66 Florida Law Review 2101-2178. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2426744

Roth v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, 490 B.R. 908 (9th Cir. BAP 2013). Available at http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/bap/2013/04/16/RothV%20ECMC%20opinion-FINAL%20AZ-11-1233.pdf

The Century Foundation criticizes Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECM) in a recent report: Shining a light on a shady debt collector

INTRODUCTION: THE CENTURY FOUNDATION SHINES A DIM LIGHT ON ECMC
AND OTHER STUDENT LOAN GUARANTY AGENCIES

The Century Foundation recently issued a report criticizing the federal student-loan guaranty agencies--including Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC), which has earned a reputation as a heartless student-loan debt collector. The report explains the complicated history of the loan guarantee agencies and is well worth reading.

Collectively, these guaranty agencies hold more than $5.4 billion in unrestricted assets, most of it obtained from collecting on defaulted student loans.  Four agencies--ECMC, Lumina Foundation, Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation, and USA Funds each hold more than a billion dollars in unrestricted funds.

According to The Century Foundation, most of this money was acquired from the agencies' student-loan debt collection activities. The Foundation did not explain the fee structure for collecting student-loan debt, but in some cases at least, the guaranty agencies slap an 18.5 percent penalty on defaulted loans--18.5 percent of the loan balance and accumulated interest.

In other words, a student who takes out a student loan of $15,000 and sees the debt grow to $20,000 due to accumulated interest, can get a $$3,700 penalty attached to the loan balance if the student defaults. Thus, a $15,000 debt can grow to $23.700 in a relatively short period of time. And this is where the guarantee agencies make a lot of money.

What do these so-called charitable agencies do with their money? The guaranty  agencies spend some of their money distributing grants for purported charitable purposes, but the biggest share of these grants (25 percent) goes to "Policy Organizations." Unfortunately, the Century Foundation did not name the policy organizations that are getting the money; but my guess is that the money goes to the various think tanks and policy groups that churn out reports proclaiming that the student loan program is under control.

I wonder, for example, whether the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution got some of this money.  Both organizations have been soft peddling the student loan crisis for years.

The Century Foundation did not examine the guaranty agencies' loan collection practices, but the Foundation gently suggested that the agencies should take a more compassionate approach to collecting on defaulted student loans. "Lacking the profit motive," the report observed mildly, "a guarantee agency might be more humane in its treatment of borrowers, even if it resulted in less revenue from collections."

Ya think? ECMC in particular has savagely fought bankruptcy discharge for distressed student loan debtors for years. In the Roth case, for example, ECMC opposed bankruptcy discharge for an elderly debtor with chronic health problems who was living on less than $800 a month!  Indeed, there has been nothing charitable about ECMC's attacks on student-loan debtors in the bankruptcy courts.

Notably, the guarantee agencies awarded no grants to legal aid groups that could represent student-loan debtors in legal actions against fraudulent for-profit colleges. No money goes for legal aid to help student loan debtors in bankruptcy. Quite the contrary, ECMC and other loan guarantee agencies are spending millions of dollars paying attorneys to fight destitute debtors in the bankruptcy courts. ECMC hired six attorneys to fight Alexandra Costa-Conniff, who is fighting ECMC's appeal of her bankruptcy discharge before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Century Foundation leveled several specific criticisms of ECMC:

ECMC handsomely compensates its trustees and CEO. First, the Foundation reported that ECMC, a nonprofit charitable organization, pays its trustees annual compensation ranging from $76,000 to $142,000. According to the Foundation, it is highly unusual and controversial for a charitable organization to pay trustees such outrageous sums for what should be public service. And the Foundation says ECMC's CEO makes more than $1 million a year.

ECMC created a subsidiary to buy and run more than 50 campuses of the bankrupt Corinthian Colleges. The Century Foundation also raised questions about ECMC's purchase of more than 50 campuses from the bankrupt Corinthian Colleges system.  ECMC, which has no experience running a college, created a nonprofit subsidiary called Zenith Education Group to operate the chain of schools.

The Century Foundation asked a reasonable questions about this transaction:

Is this the case of a charity that, in purchasing the Corinthian campuses, made a noble if misguided attempt to transform a corrupt enterprise? Or is this just a corporate board seeing if they can make a buck? 

And, as TCF pointed out, the trustees for Zenith are the same people who are the trustees for ECMC. The Foundation charged that ECMC hid the fact that the Zenith trustees were being paid as ECMC trustees when it filed Zenith's application for IRS tax-exempt status. The Foundation also pointed out that the IRS apparently did no more than a cursory review of Zenith's application, approving the new organization's tax-exempt status in only six weeks (far faster, apparently, than the Tea Party groups' applications).

CONCLUSION:

THE CENTURY REPORT ON LOAN GUARANTEE AGENCIES IS A GOOD START BUT GLARING QUESTIONS REMAIN UNANSWERED

The Century Foundation's report is a useful document. In particular, the report explains how the guaranty agencies were formed and how they make their money. But some glaring questions remain unanswered, including:

Exactly how much do the executive officers of the loan guaranty agencies get paid each year? The Century Foundation's report said that ECMC's CEO makes more than a million dollars a year, but we've known that for some time.  Bloomberg reported in 2013 that Richard Boyle, ECMC's CEO at the time, made $1.1 million in 2010 and that the ECMC's CFO made a half million.  Surely Jane Hines, ECMC's current CEO, makes more than Boyle did in 2010. How much did Dave Hawn make when he served as ECMC's CEO?

How much are other ECMC executives making now?  And how much are the senior officers making at the other guaranty agencies?

Which policy foundations get paid by the guaranty agencies? If we see the list, I'll bet we'll find the guaranty agencies are funding think tanks that support the status quo in the student loan program.

How much does ECMC pay the attorneys it hires to harass destitute student-loan debtors who file for bankruptcy? The Department of Education said in 2015 that loan collectors shouldn't fight bankruptcy discharge for student loan debt when it is not cost effective to do so, but ECMC and DOE itself appear to be fighting every college-loan borrower who seeks to discharge student debt in bankruptcy. ECMC must be spending millions on lawyers, but I would like to know exactly how much.

Are the guaranty agencies paying lobbyists; and if so, how much? Corinthian Colleges filed a list of its creditors when it filed for bankruptcy awhile back, and that list showed that Corinthian had hired several Washington lobbyists to represent its interests. It would not surprise me to learn that the guaranty agencies have also  hired lobbyists to protect their operations.

In short, The Century Foundation report just scratched the surface regarding the loan guaranty agencies. All we know for sure about them is that they have accumulated more than $5 billion, most of it from distressed student-loan debtors and that one of them pays its trustees unseemly amounts of money.

Let's find out more. Maybe those Senators who are so outraged by Wells Fargo could vent some of their pent-up spleen toward the loan guarantee agencies.

References

John Hechinger. Taxpayers Fund $454,000 Pay for Collector Chasing Student Loans. Bloomberg.com, May 15, 2013. Accessible at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-15/taxpayers-fund-454-000-pay-for-collector-chasing-student-loans.html

Brown, M., Haughwout, A., Lee, D., Mabutas, M., and van der Klaauw, W. (2012). Grading student loans. New York: Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Accessible at: http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012/03/grading-student-loans.html

Natalie Kitroeff. Loan Monitor Is Accused of Ruthless Tactics on Student Debt. New York Times, January 1, 2014.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/us/loan-monitor-is-accused-of-ruthless-tactics-on-student-debt.html

Roth v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, 490 B.R. 908 (9th Cir. BAP  2013). 

Robert Shireman and Tariq Habash. Have Student Loan Guaranty Agencies Lost Their Way? The Century Foundation, September 29, 2016. Accessible at https://tcf.org/content/report/student-loan-guaranty-agencies-lost-way/

Student Loans, Bankruptcy, and Creditors' Lawyers: If Auschwitz Comes to the United States, Will Attorneys Handle the Paperwork?

I was a child when I learned about the Nazi concentration camps. I was a voracious reader when I was young, and I often wandered around our town library, browsing through the books. One day, I pulled a book off a shelf because I was intrigued by the title, and the pages fell open to a photo of one of the German concentration camps. It might have been Auschwitz, but I don't remember.

The photo showed dozens of naked and emaciated corpses piled in a heap, and that was all. I remember being viscerally shocked and frightened by what I saw, and I immediately realized that the dead people who appeared in the photo were the victims of human monsters.

I thought about that photo for weeks, and I finally comforted myself with the childish conviction that the death camps would never come to America--that Americans could never commit such savage acts.

I hope I get off work in time to see my kid's soccer game

I was naive of course.  As I grew older, I realized there are plenty of Americans who will do anything they are directed to do--no matter how much pain they inflict on other human beings.

The people who operated the Nazi death camps were, after all, ordinary people.  They probably read their morning newspapers over breakfast and played with their children after work in the evenings. They labored for the Nazi death machine for a variety of mundane reasons--maybe they just needed a paycheck.

And this brings me to the lawyers who work for Educational Credit Management Corporation, perhaps the federal government's most aggressive debt collector against student-loan borrowers. ECMC's attorneys have gone into bankruptcy court time after time to oppose debt relief for distressed student-loan debtors.  In the Roth case, for example, ECMC's legal counsel opposed bankruptcy relief for Janet Roth, an elderly debtor with chronic health problems who was living on less than $800 a month. ECMC harried Ms. Roth all the way to the Ninth Circuit's Bankruptcy Appellate Panel.

In a letter dated July 7, 2015, Lynn Mahaffie, a Department of Education bureaucrat, issued a letter advising creditors like ECMC not to oppose bankruptcy relief for student debtors if the cost of fighting a bankruptcy discharge did not make the effort worthwhile.

But that letter was just bullshit. The Department of Education and its loan collectors almost always oppose bankruptcy relief for student-loan debtors--whether or not it is cost effective to do so.  For example, in Acosta-Conniff v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, an Alabama bankruptcy judge discharged Alexandra Acosta-Conniff's student loan debt. Conniff was a single mother of two children working as a school teacher, and the court reasoned quite sensibly that Conniff would not be able to pay off her student loans.

ECMC dispatched six attorneys to appeal the bankruptcy court's decision: David Edwin Rains, Kristofer David Sodergren, Rachel Lavender Webber, Robert Allen Morgan, Margaret Hammond Manuel, and David Chip Schwartz. Six attorneys--and Conniff didn't even have a lawyer!

Not surprisingly, ECMC won its appeal.  Six lawyers against a single mother of two who can't afford an attorney--it was hardly a fair fight.

Conniff has a lawyer now, and she is appealing the district court's unfavorable decision to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. ECMC has a platoon of lawyers to represent it before the Eleventh Circuit, and who knows how much that costs?

But ECMC apparently doesn't care how much the appeal will cost, and the Department of Education obviously doesn't care either. Otherwise it would direct its loan collectors not to harass insolvent student-loan debtors in the bankruptcy courts.

Now I am not comparing ECMC's lawyers to Nazi death-camp workers. Being a debt collector's attorney is not intrinsically evil; and any misery inflicted on a student-loan debtor in a bankruptcy court is trivial compared to the horrors of Auschwitz. I feel sure ECMC's lawyers are all decent people.

Nevertheless, I personally could not sleep at night if I were representing ECMC in the bankruptcy courts against people like Janet Roth or Alexandra Acosta-Conniff.  I would ask myself whether I am serving the interests of justice by helping ECMC deprive honest but unfortunate college-loan borrowers a fresh start in life.

But I don't imagine ECMC's attorneys ask themselves that question. And I doubt whether they have trouble sleeping at night. After all, the lawyers have their own student loans to pay off; and everyone has to make a living.


Note: A quick search in the Westlaw data base turned up 557 cases in which Educational Credit Management Corporation appeared as a named party.


References

Fossey, R. & Cloud, R. C. (2015). Tidings of comfort and joy: In an astonishingly compassionate decision, a bankruptcy judge discharged the student loans of an Alabama school teacher who acted as her own attorney. Teachers College Record Online, tcrecord.org. ID Number 18040. 

ECMC v. Acosta-Conniff, 550 BR 557 (M.D. Ala. 2016).

In re Roth, 490 B.R. 908 (9th Cir. BAP 2013).

Natalie Kitroeff. Loan Monitor Is Accused of Ruthless Tactics on Student Debt  New York Times, January 1, 2014.

Educational Credit Management Corporation v. Acosta-Conniff; A lifetime of Indebtedness is the future for most college borrowers

James Howard Kunstler wrote one of his best essays recently about America's opioid epidemic., and he began his essay with this observation:

 While the news waves groan with stories about "America's Opioid Epidemic," you may discern that there is little effort to actually understand what's behind it, namely the fact that life in the United States has become unspeakably depressing, empty, and purposeless for a large class of citizens.

Kunstler went on to describe life in small town and rural America: the empty store fronts, abandoned houses, neglected fields, and "the parasitical national chain stores like tumors at the edge of every town."

Kunstler also commented about people's physical appearance in backwater America: "prematurely old, fattened and sickened by bad food made to look and taste irresistible to con those sick in despair." And he also described how many people living in the forgotten America spend their time: "trash television, addictive computer games, and their own family melodramas concocted to give some narrative meaning to lives otherwise bereft of event or effort."

There are no jobs in flyover America. No wonder opioid addiction has become epidemic in the old American heartland. No wonder death rates are going up for working-class white Americans--spiked by suicide, alcohol and drug addiction.

I myself come from the desperate heartland Kunstler described. Anadarko, Oklahoma, county seat of Caddo County, made the news awhile back due to four youth suicides in quick succession--all accomplished with guns. Caddo County, shaped liked the state of Utah, can easily be spotted on the New York Times map showing where drug deaths are highest in the United States. Appalachia, Oklahoma, the Rio Grande Valley, and yes--Caddo County have the nation's highest death rates caused by drugs.

Why? Kunstler puts his finger on it: "These are the people who have suffered their economic and social roles in life to be stolen from them. They do not work at things that matter.They have no prospect for a better life . . . ."

Now here is the point I wish to make. These Americans, who now live in despair, once hoped for a better life. There was a spark of buoyancy and optimism in these people when they were young. They believed then--and were incessantly encouraged to believe--that education would improve their economic situation. If they just got a degree from an overpriced, dodgy for-profit college or a technical certificate from a mediocre trade school, or maybe just a bachelor's degree from the obscure liberal arts college down the road--they would spring into the middle class.

Postsecondary education, these pathetic fools believed, would deliver them into ranch-style homes, perhaps with a swimming pool in the backyard; into better automobiles, into intact and healthy families that would put their children into good schools.

And so these suckers took out student loans to pay for bogus educational experiences, often not knowing the interest rate on the money they borrowed or the payment terms. Without realizing it, they signed covenants not to sue--covenants written in type so small and expressed in language so obscure they did not realize they were signing away their right to sue for fraud even as they were being defrauded.

And a great many people who embarked on these quixotic educational adventures did not finish the educational programs they started, or they finished them and found the degrees or certificates they acquired did not lead to good jobs. So they stopped paying on their loans and were put into default.

And then the loan collectors arrived--reptilian agencies like Educational Credit Management Corporation or Navient Services.  The debt collectors added interest and penalties to the amount the poor saps borrowed, and all of a sudden, they owed twice what they borrowed, or maybe three times what they borrowed. Or maybe even four times what they borrowed.

Does this scenario--repeated millions of time across America over the last 25 years--drive people to despair? Does it drive them to drug addiction, to alcoholism, to suicide?

Of course not. And even if it does, who the hell cares?

References

James Howard Kunstler. The National Blues. Clusterfuck Nation, April 28, 2017.

Sarah Kaplan.'It has brought us to our knees': Small Okla. town reeling from suicide epidemic. Washington Post, January 25, 2016.

Natalie Kitroeff. Loan Monitor Is Accused of Ruthless Tactics on Student Debt. New York Times, January 1, 2014.

Gina Kolata and Sarah Cohen. Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites. New York Times, January 16, 2016.

Student Loan Bankruptcy and Educational Credit Management Corporation: Who pays the ECMC lawyers?

I know quite a bit about the student loan crisis. After studying both governmental and nongovernmental documents, I know the student-loan default rate is much higher than the government reports. According to the Department of Eduction, the three-year default rate is about 10 percent, but the people who stop paying on their loans is at least 30 percent.  And among people who attended for-profit colleges, the default rate is at least 50 percent.

I also know a lot about college borrowers who try to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy. Shedding student loans through bankruptcy is difficult, but over the past three years or so, a number of bankruptcy courts have ruled in favor of college-loan debtors, showing both compassion and common sense.

But I dont' know who pays the lawyers for the student-debt collection agencies that fight student debtors in the bankruptcy courts or how much those lawyers get paid. 

In particular, who paid the lawyers for Educational Credit Management Corporation, which opposed bankruptcy relief for Janet Roth, an elderly woman with chronic health problems who was living on  Social Security income of only  $774 a month?  And ECMC lawyers didn't just fight Ms. Roth in the bankruptcy court, it fought her all the way to the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And everybody knew that Jane Roth's income was so low that she would have paid nothing on her student loans even if she lost her case. 

Who paid the ECMC lawyers who appealed a bankruptcy decision in favor of George and Melanie Johnson, a couple with two school-age children who lost their home in a foreclosure proceeding?

And who ultimately paid the tab for ECMC to fight bankruptcy relief for Janice Stevenson, a woman in her 50s with a history of homelessness who was living on only at thousand dollars a month?

A New York Times article reported that ECMC has been accused of ruthless loan-collection tactics, and I would say ruthless is putting it mildly. And take my word for it, ECMC lawyers aren't working for free.

To paraphrase the great Lynyrd Skynyrd, I know a little about student loans and bankruptcy, and baby I can guess the rest. I think the taxpayers are paying  ECMC's lawyers--either directly or indirectly. 

In a letter issued last July, Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education Lynne Mahaffie wrote that student-loan debt collectors should take cost into account when deciding when to oppose bankruptcy discharge for distressed college-loan borrowers. But if ECMC is absorbing the cost of attorney fees to fight Jane Roth, Janice Stevenson, and Mr. and Mrs.Johnson, why would the Department of Education care what ECMC is spending in its collection efforts? 

Certainly ECMC wasn't taking cost into account when it dragged Janet Roth through the federal courts for several years.  There could have been no monetary gain to the taxpayers in fighting bankruptcy relief for Ms. Roth.

In the months to come, we will see if DOE really meant it when it authorized Mahaffie to say that DOE and its student-loan debt collectors would not fight bankruptcy discharge of student loans when it is not cost effective to do so.

My guess is this. ECMC will continue harassing student-loan debtors in the bankruptcy courts as long as its lawyers get paid for doing so.  So if Lynn Mahaffie really meant what she said in that 2015 letter, DOE needs to change the system whereby ECMC lawyers get rich hounding people like Jane Roth, Janice Stevenson, and George and Melanie Johnson.

References

Natalie Kitroeff. Loan Monitor is Accused of Ruthless Tactics on Student Debt. New York Times, January 1, 2014. Acccessible at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/us/loan-monitor-is-accused-of-ruthless-tactics-on-student-debt.html?_r=0

Lynn Mahaffie. Undue Hardship Discharge of Title IV Loans in Bankruptcy Adversary Proceedings, July 7, 2015, GEN 15-13.  Accesible at https://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN1513.pdf

Roth v. Educational Credit Management Corporation, 490 B.R. 908 (9th Cir. BAP 2013). Accessible at http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/bap/2013/04/16/RothV%20ECMC%20opinion-FINAL%20AZ-11-1233.pdf