Consumer complaint received 2024-01-27
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Trouble with how payments are being handled
Company: MOHELA (VA)

On XX/XX/23 I completed an application on the Federal Student Aid website to change to the SAVE plan. I was told my monthly would be {$800.00}. The application was transmitted to MOHELA, and they confirmed receipt XX/XX/23. 
I never received a correspondence about the status or processing of my SAVE application. I called twice as the repayment restart was approaching, the first in early XXXX, and, I believe, the second in either late XXXX or early XXXX. I don't know the exact dates of those calls, but it was in that range. 
In the first call, the MOHELA representative told me that the application was erroneously marked as a duplicate and not processed. She marked it for reprocessing at that time and said I would receive a correspondence within a couple of weeks. I asked if forbearance would count towards PSLF and she said a very clear NO ( we later, obviously, learned that the admin forbearance was supposed to count towards PSLF ).

In the second call, I asked again about the status of my SAVE application. The representative said that it was still in progress. She also confirmed that admin forbearance would NOT count towards my desperately needed PSLF. We discussed how to manually enter my payments and she processed the request to remove me from forbearance. The representative instructed that payments made while the request to return to payments was processing would be backdated and thus count towards PSLF. 
I made payments of nearly {$1000.00} each in XXXX and XXXX. In XXXX, my account reflected no payments due and that the month would count towards PSLF. 
In XXXX, I received two correspondences from MOHELA dated in XXXX about the admin forbearance. Later this month, I received a notification that my IBR request had been processed and my payments would be {$990.00} per month. This is not at all what my XXXXAVE application from FSA said, and I still haven't heard any specific updates about my SAVE application despite repeated requests, both in phone calls and messages through their system. 
Not only have they lied, but they are refusing to honor the lower SAVE monthly payment approved through FSA.They 've ignored repeated requests for updates, and lied about the PSLF counts for XXXX and XXXX while in admin forbearance, causing me to lose approximately {$2000.00} I did not have to pay. Now, they're continuing to charge me over {$150.00} more per month than decided by FSA. I'm not clear if they just junked my SAVE application and put me in the regular IBR, or if they decided that their own calculations were better than the ones used by FSA.

All of this is on top of countless other issues with MOHELA, from their complete ineptitude at assuming control of all of these federal student loans from other processors, to properly counting PSLF totals and granting forgiveness, to completely bungling to the restart of repayments and the SAVE program. The number of problems with this company far surpasses the standard for negligence, and they should be held to account by the government. How much are we paying this company for their understaffed, ill-trained, and flagrantly incompetent loan servicing? Why on earth should they receive another cent from loan borrowers or on the federal contract when their behavior is this egregious? 
I qualified for $ XXXX on the SAVE plan on XX/XX/23. I demand that MOHELA honor this, refund the nearly {$2000.00} XXXX spent because they lied and tricked us into making unnecessary payments, refund an additional {$180.00} for the XXXX payment that they charged under the wrong plan, and immediately set my repayments to {$800.00} for XXXX and on. I also don't want to see any nonsense about recertification for the next year as they have absolutely screwed me at every turn on this, and I will not have them demanding recertification early to try to make up any of the money they should lose on this.