Consumer complaint received 2017-06-01
Company: AES/PHEAA
State: NY
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 was transferred from my previous servicer to FedLoan Servicing based on my submittal of a XXXX XXXX  Loan Forgiveness form. Since then, my experience with FedLoan Servicing has been nothing short of disgusting. They have mishandled applications and submitted documents, miscalculated payments, placed me and my wife in the wrong repayment plan ( repeatedly ), lost or " misallocated '' my payment records and more. I have been working with them again, for the past three months, to resolve the most recent problem surrounding my PSLF eligibility. I was supposed to be in an income-based repayment ( IBR ) plan, as required by the PSLF program, and was repeatedly assured that I was. The Supervisor I spoke to in XXXX informed me, quite rudely, that I had NOT previously been on a IBR, as I was informed, but rather had only been on one since XXXX. This was shocking enough, until today (XX/XX/XXXX ) when the representative and supervisor I spoke to at FedLoan informed me that actually, no, I have n't been on an IBR plan for almost two years.
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I have been a XXXX XXXX for 15 years and have faithfully made 10 years of payments, as I thought I was supposed to. And now that the loan forgiveness date is approaching, only now am I being told that the last ten years counted for nothing. Additionally, when I learned of this from FedLoan and asked what could be done, since I had followed their direction, I was treated with disdain. The supervisor I spoke to in XXXX was cold, aloof and acted as if she was personally paying off my loan under the PSLF, stating " Well if you 're asking me to forgive thousands of dollars of debt ... '' Additionally, my monthly payment was recently quadrupled due to a small increase in my family 's income, so I am currently attempting to lower my payments. Yet every time I call, the representative gives me a different payment amount ranging from {$38.00} to {$250.00}, and each of them swears it is the lowest possible payment available and can not see how the previous representative came to the payment amount they did. When my wife called, she was told the lowest possible payment ranged from around {$200.00} to over {$600.00}, again each of them swearing there was no lower payment possible under any plan. It is inexplicable.
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My wife 's and my every contact with FedLoan Servicing has been rife with incompetence, if not downright deception. I do not understand why, if you contact them and say " I want the lowest possible payment, under whichever plan that would be '' can they not come up with a consistent answer. Lastly, I was beyond distraught to learn that the last 10 years of payments I have made have counted toward nothing under the PSLF program, despite me doing everything I was directed to do.
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Thank you for your time and I pray you 'll be able to do something about this company before someone else is negatively affected.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation