Consumer complaint received 2017-11-09
Company: AES/PHEAA
State: NC
Product: Student loan
Sub-product: Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer
Sub-issue: Received bad information about your loan

Complaint:
This is a PSLF matter. In XX/XX/XXXX of this year ( XX/XX/XXXX ) I filed my first two ( 2 ) employment verification forms for qualifying employment spanning the time period from XX/XX/XXXX to  XX/XX/XXXX. That initiated the process of my loans being transferred from XXXX XXXX to XXXX. Because I was eager to see how many qualifying payments I had made, I called in once my loans had fully transferred ( XX/XX/XXXX ) and was told that it would take 60 days to get that reviewed. Calling in 60 days later, I was told it would be another 60 days before I would be told the number of qualifying payments I had made, and this repeated all the way until the end of XXXX ( seven ( 7 ) months after my first call ) when I was finally told I had made 24 qualifying payments on two ( 2 ) loans and 27 qualifying payments on the other set of loans ( the first set having slightly fewer payments because of when I consolidated those loans which I had never previously been informed did not qualify for PSLF ). I knew this had to be low because I had not missed a payment over the full 42 months during that period - I was always on IBR and always making auto-payments of the full amount due. I knew the number should be closer to ( roughly ) 38 because of the several forbearances servicers had put me in when I was re-certifying my income-based payment plans. To that point, they never gave me the option to continue making qualifying payments while I was re-certifying, they just told me my payments were going to be put on pause. 

I called in today ( XX/XX/XXXX ) to ask why I was missing roughly 15 qualifying payments. I found out that there were 4 months of forbearances ( three ( 3 ) during re-certifications and one due to a lag in auto payments kicking in ), but from the period from XX/XX/XXXX to XX/XX/XXXX,  they had me listed as having made " insufficient payments. '' Again, I do n't believe this is possible because I was always on auto-payment for the full amount of my IBR payment. Additionally, I have never received any notifications that I was making less than full payments, that my payments were late, or any other notification that would explain a designation of " insufficient payments. '' The XXXX rep today stated that she submitted those " insufficient payment '' months for review, but its going to take at least another 60 days for me to hear back as to the resolution. 

I 'm reporting this because I do n't know how many other student loan borrowers are suffering from these same kind of inaccuracies, and there needs to be a record of the 1 ) lengthy period borrowers relying on PSLF have to wait for any type of accounting, 2 ) what can be considered forced or involuntary forbearances during the re-certification, and 3 ) the completely inaccurate reporting of payment statuses. Had I not caught this ( and assuming it will be properly corrected ) this would have cost me several thousands of dollars in principal and interest payments that otherwise would have been forgiven once I 've made my full 120 qualifying payments. 

If this is not a one-off error, there could be many borrowers like me that are being cheated out of a year or more of valid qualifying payments by student loan servicers.

Company response to consumer: Closed with non-monetary relief