Consumer complaint received 2019-06-29
Company: PENTAGON FEDERAL CREDIT UNION
State: NJ
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process

Complaint:
Please review the entire history of my mortgage account with Pentagon Federal Credit Union. From the very beginning, it has failed to apply payments made, failed to apply the correct amount of a particular payment to principal, and, as a result of the foregoing, failed to apply payments it has received to the correct amount of principal and interest. The result is that it has collected more in interest than it should and will continue to do so indefinitely. I complained about some of this several years ago, when it debited my XXXX XXXX checking account, then returned it to the account before the mortgage went into repayment. The result was that an entire payment was not deducted from principal before repayment started ; I did not have time to reschedule the reversed payment because it took so long for the reversal to show up because of PenFed 's slow operations. By the time the reversal showed up, the grace period was close to ending and there was no way to schedule an inter-institution transfer at that time between PenFed and my funding account, despite the fact that PenFed debited the account electronically and at least one of the 2 payments that PenFed credited during the grace period was an electronic payment. At that time, it would not allow me to schedule another electronic payment for the one it arbitrarily reversed and took a long time notifying me it about. There were 3 of these early payments during the grace period before the loan went into repayment, but I was credited only for 2. I should be allowed now to correct this mistake caused by PenFed 's slow and inept operations, such that another payment solely to principal should be allowed retroactively to the beginning of the loan. 

Last month ( XX/XX/2019), it again messed up my mortgage payment. Because I could not do it myself through online banking, I called PenFed and asked it to reduce the amount it debited electronically from my XXXX XXXX account from {$1900.00} to the regular monthly payment of {$1500.00}. Despite numerous telephone calls and emails sent to them about this, commencing at least on XX/XX/XXXX, it failed to do what I requested. Instead of doing what Id requested, PenFed debited my XXXX XXXX account for both amounts, the {$1900.00} and the {$1500.00}. Its mortgage servicing department is rarely available when I try to reach it by telephone. I can only get member services which tells me that its mortgage servicing department is not available but that they will send it a message to call me. Then I never hear from them, typically, or if they call and leave a message, whenever I call them again, they are not available again. I spent hours on the phone trying to reach it and when I finally did, it failed to do what I requested. Thereafter, it kept insisting that I contact it again, only to reiterate what Id already requested. When I call them, I get member services only and can not reach anyone in mortgage servicing. This persisted for days in late XX/XX/XXXX. At some point, I could not afford the inordinate amount of time simply to repeat the same request, over and over and over again. I finally asked XXXX XXXX to credit me for the {$1900.00} that PenFed debited errantly in addition to the regular mortgage amount of {$1500.00}. To this day, I think PenFed may have credited me for a {$1500.00} that was paid in late XX/XX/XXXX, but they sent me an inaccurate statement in the mail and their online accounting for the mortgage loan is incoherent. I do not know what PenFed 's real accounting on this loan is now. 

This arose in part because of PenFeds falsely advertised claim that I could initiate an electronic transfer of funds between my mortgage account ( or the PenFed share account ) and my XXXX XXXX account. Yet I had been paying the mortgage this way for years, via electronic transfers between these two institutions. It appears that PenFed failed to include XXXX XXXX in my list of accounts when it changed its software on online banking. But it also proved incapable of doing this correctly by hand or in response to my request. 

This month, XX/XX/2019, I am paying my mortgage loan from PenFed by electronically transferring the mortgage payment from XXXX XXXX to my share account at PenFed, then paying the mortgage through an internal transfer from the PenFed share account to the mortgage account. This is because a direct electronic transfer between these two institutions directly to the mortgage account does not work from the PenFed side and hardly worked when I first tried to transfer payments from my XXXX XXXX account. XXXX A second person on these joint accounts filed a CFPB complaint recently about problems at XXXX XXXX when we tried to transfer the money from XXXX XXXX to PenFed. ) I need to be credited with all 3 payments made before my mortgage loan went into repayment, that I made originally. Then the CFPB should audit my mortgage account entirely. Despite the fact that I have paid all or almost all of my payments earlier than they are due, paying them on the XX/XX/XXXX of the previous month, when they are due on the XX/XX/XXXX of the next month, I have not been credited with more of the payments going to principal rather than interest because of the consistently early payments each month since repayment on the loan began. 

Please ensure that my mortgage payment to PenFed this month be credited on the same day it has usually been ( on the XXXX or XXXX of the month preceding the start of the next month ) until all of this can be straightened out. This was when PenFed insisted on debiting my XXXX XXXX account and would not allow me to initiate an electronic payment from my funding account at XXXX XXXX, a situation that greatly disadvantaged me and my ability to control and make timely payments on the loan. Please make sure that these earlier-than-due payments are credited to greater amounts of principal than if the payments had been received on the due date of the 1st of each month.

Please sanction PenFed for falsely advertising the availability of electronic transfers through its online banking software between 2 institutions where EFTs have been in place for years. Because PenFed dropped XXXX XXXX from my list of external institutions while it claimed that I could make these transfers through online banking, I could not transfer money back and forth between these two accounts in late XX/XX/XXXXwhen I tried to adjust my mortgage payment from {$1900.00} to {$1500.00}. Please sanction PenFed for its failure to make people in its mortgage servicing department reasonably and readily available by telephone. And please make it credit my mortgage account for all the extra interest it has collected and will try to collect in these multiple, multi-year accounting errors. 

Please effectively sanction and prohibit PenFed from continuing to operate as usual in the aforementioned matters. Please prohibit it from issuing any more mortgages until all of its mortgages are reviewed and corrected for similar mistakes as those just described.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation