Consumer complaint received 2017-03-02
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with my lender or servicer — Received bad information about my loan
Company: AES/PHEAA (NV)

In XX/XX/XXXX, I completed my income recertification and asked to switch from IBR to PAYE. I was told that if the switch to PAYE was approved, I would have one month where I would be put on the standard plan ( with reduced payment forbearance ) and then the following month I would switch to the PAYE plan. In XX/XX/XXXX, I received a bill for {$5.00}, so I assumed that was the month in reduced payment forbearance. I have direct debit set up so I took no action. In XX/XX/XXXX I received another bill for {$5.00}, so I logged into my account because I thought the XXXX payment should have been a PAYE payment. When I logged in, I saw that they had not debited the XXXX payment at all, so I called FedLoan Servicing on XX/XX/XXXX and spoke to Employee XXXX who told me that XXXX should have been an IBR payment, XXXX should have been the reduced payment forbearance, and XXXX should be the PAYE payment. Unfortunately someone at FedLoan Servicing mistakenly placed my account into delinquency forbearance in XXXX ( my account was never delinquent ) and they did n't direct debit the payment because when an account is in any kind of forbearance, the payment can only be manually made ( they never notified me that they would not accept direct debit ). The employee was able to reactivate the XXXX bill ( remove the improper delinquency forbearance ) and have me manually pay the IBR payment amount. He also instructed me to manually pay the XXXX reduced payment forbearance and was able to confirm that I was approved to start they PAYE plan in XXXX with direct debit. I am XXXX military ( on track for PSLF ), so my primary concern was that the XXXX payment should still count as a qualifying payment for PSLF since the error had been caused by FedLoan Servicing. My secondary concern was that because they had not direct debited the XXXX amount as they should have, my interest rate erroneously rose from XXXX % to XXXX %. It took multiple calls ( on XX/XX/2017 I spoke with Employee XXXX ; on XXXX I spoke with Employee XXXX ; and on XXXX I spoke with Employee XXXX ) before I was offered assurance that they would not in my record that the XX/XX/XXXX payment should count toward PSLF, that the XXXX payment was properly adjusted, including the interest rate, and the issue should be ( hopefully ) resolved. The reason I 'm filing the complaint is because this is the 3rd time there was an error with my account ( the first 2 times it did not seem to be standard practice for employees to provide employee ID numbers at the start of calls like they do now ). The first time was when I initially entered XXXX it took several requests before they lowered my interest rate in accordance with SCRA ( and I 'm still not 100 % convinced that the interest rate reduction was made retroactive to the time I entered XXXX ). The second time was in the winter of 2015, they failed to mail me notice that it was time for me to recertify my income, so my payment amount suddenly spiked to the standard repayment amount. When I noticed the astronomical amount pulled from my savings account, I called to several times to fix the error, but they ended up putting my account into forbearance without my permission ( causing me to miss out on two months of qualifying PSLF payments ), increasing my interest rate because they tinkered with my direct debit setup, and providing misleading information about how I should address the issue. It took months before they switched me back to my IBR payment and I still do n't feel they adequately resolved the damage caused by their mistakes. I 'm especially concerned because I am relatively conversant on federal student loan issues and I repeatedly had to tell the people I talked to that their advice to me was coming across as very predatory and I would hate to think they treat all service members who may not be as conversant in the rules they same way that they treated me.