Consumer complaint received 2023-07-22
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Received bad information about your loan
Company: MOHELA (TX)

I am submitting this complaint due to my student loan servicer and student aid.gov providing inaccurate details related to my PSLF eligibility and failed to update my qualifying payment information timely which prevented me from taking appropriate actions related to loan consolidation. I have worked in public service since XXXX. After the PSLF program was initially announced, I never thought I qualified because I had a FFLEP loans and did not want to loose my payment history due to a consolidation. I took prompt action when the PSLF program was expanded to include the TPSLF option, which allowed me to retain qualifying payments made on the FFLEP, even after consolidation. I immediately consolidated all my federal loans into a direct consolidation loan, with the exception of a newly funded parent plus direct loan I had taken out to help my son with his first year of college. At that time, the servicer advised the parent plus loans could not be consolidated for purposes of PSLF. After consolidation of my FFELP and direct loans, I submitted my employer certification forms and applied for PSLF forgiveness. I submitted employment certification forms and PSLF applications 10 times between XXXX and XXXX to ensure I was able to take advantage of the new program before the deadline. I followed all the steps outlined by student aid and followed up consistently to check the status. After the first 8 denials of my PSLF application and no progress with updating my PSLF status, I filed two complaints with student aid.gov in attempt to gain resolution and advocate for them to properly credit my payment history. I never received any correspondence, updates, or investigation results from my complaints. I waited over two years for my PSLF status to be accurately updated with no guidance from the loan servicers. My history and eligible PSLF payments were never updated in my online accounts with Mohela or studentaid.gov over those two years. When I started applying for forgiveness in XXXX, I estimated that I was close to the 120 required eligible payments to qualify for forgiveness but was consistently told I had no eligible payments. I even downloaded my payment history with XXXX, former servicer, and uploaded that with my studentaid.gov complaint to prove I had over 4  years of eligible payments that was not captured by student aid.gov account, payment history or eligible PSLF payment counts. In early XXXX, I came across an article that indicated a parent plus loan could now be consolidated with the other direct loans and included in the PSLF forgiveness. The concern was that by consolidating that parent plus loan, i would no longer qualify for the income based repayment plan that was affordable for my budget at that time. I made multiple calls to studentaid and Mohela trying to get my updated PSLF status to help guide my decision making, but Unfortunately I was not helped, which prevented me from pursuing the consolidation of that parent loan. My concern at that time was how I was mislead by my loan servicers regarding my pslf status. Due to the loan servicers advising I did not have the number of eligible payments required for PSLF, I decided not to consolidate the parent loan out of fear that I would not be able to afford the payments according to the repayment plan associated with the parent loan. I was mislead to think that I would still have several years of repayments before qualifying for PSLF and I feared how that would impact myself and my family financially.If I had been given accurate and updated qualifying payment information that supported I was within 1-2 years of forgiveness, I would have proceeded with the consolidation loan to ensure the parent plus loan was included in the PSLF forgiveness, once eligible. In late XXXX, I received an unexpected letter from Mohela indicating that I had met the 120 qualifying payments and my direct consolidation student loan had been forgiven through the PSLF program. I was never given any updates regarding my PSLF status until that letter. Even after receiving the letter, my PSLF eligible payment count on my studentaid and Mohela accounts online had not changes and continued to reflect that I did not have any qualifying PSLF payment counts. To date, the information on those online do not match the payment accounts reflected in the letter with the PSLF forgiveness. In fact, my studentaid account summery online continued to inaccurately reflected that my consolidation loan balances had been paid in full, with no reference that the loans had actually been forgiven via PSLF. Even to this day, I can not locate any documents on either website regarding my forgiveness or PSLF status. My complaint is that I was denied the opportunity to consolidate an eligible parent plus loan with the consolidation loan to have it included in the PSLF forgiveness. Since I can only receive PSLF forgiveness one time, I will never have the opportunity for student loan forgiveness of the parent plus loan despite it being eligible at the time the direct loan was forgiven and despite devoting my life to public service for the last 16 years. I am having to start completely over with making student loan payments on the parent plus loan that should have been forgiven. I have attempted to file a PSLF reconsideration request on the student aid website but the form/tool will not populate.