Consumer complaint received 2017-09-19
Company: AES/PHEAA
State: WA
Product: Student loan
Sub-product: Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer
Sub-issue: Trouble with how payments are being handled

Complaint:
My student loan servicer is FedLoan Servicing. I have been dealing with them since XXXX when my loan was transferred to them from XXXX XXXX in XXXX due to being on an income-based repayment plan. I have been paying my loans since XXXX. The entire time of repayment, I have worked for employers that qualify under the Public Student Loan Forgiveness Program [ PSLF ] My difficulties with F/edLoan Servicing is that they are unwilling to recalculate PSLF-eligible payments. Again, I have been paying since XXXX and they are only counting 24 payments as being eligible. When I call to get an explanation or to rectify the situation, I get conflicting information. I have yet to hear the same explanation twice which leads me to believe they do not know what they are doing. 

They promise to do a payment recalculation which, they say, takes 60 days to complete. I have never heard back from any of these requests. I have spoken with supervisors who also have promised to do research, follow up and rectify the situation, but there has been no communication or resolution on their end at all. 

They continually send back paperwork that I submit, refuse to answer my online questions about all of this and never follow up. Most recently, I spoke with " XXXX '' [ extension XXXX ] on XXXX/XXXX/XXXX about all of this and he promised to email me paperwork to fill out as well as source material outlining where FedLoan Servicing gets their information about how PSLF works. I never received the email from him. I left him a voicemail and he never returned my call. 

This treatment has been the norm when dealing with FedLoan Servicing and I believe that they are defrauding a large population of this country into making more payments towards their student loans outside the government PSLF program payment amount of XXXX. By refusing to count payments that clearly qualify, FedLoan Servicing are extending the 120 month payoff to much longer. Their lack of communication or resolution indicate that this is deliberately intended to defraud people. 

Because this agency is the sole student loan servicer dealing with PSLF, I feel that this violates anti-trust laws. This is a monopoly sanctioned by the US Department of Education and there needs to be some serious evaluation on its ethics and handling of student loan debt.
Again, here are my complaints : 1. They refuse to recalculate payments eligible to count towards the 120 month payoff outlined by the Public Student Loan Forgiveness Program.
2. They give wildly contradicting " information '' about how payments are calculated. Every time I have spoken to an employee, I hear a completely different story. This is no different when speaking with the supervisors.
3. They do not respond to their online " Contact Us '' nor do they follow up with you when you call. They do not email documentation or links as promised on phone conversations. They repetitively reject paperwork pertinent to my payment status [ they have returned my application for a PSLF-eligible employer 5 times ] and when they finally do accept anything, they mess the dates up in their system which becomes advantageous to them in that they get to subtract PSLF-eligible payments. They say they will fix the situation, but when I check the status of the correction months later, nothing was done. 

I have had enough of this company and will be contacting my senator to complain. There needs to be a massive overhaul of this system to help people in need pay off their student loan debt according to government-led programs such as PSLF.

Company response to consumer: Closed with non-monetary relief