Consumer complaint received 2018-03-28
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Trouble with how payments are being handled
Company: AES/PHEAA (MS)

Complaint:
I have been enrolled in the PSLF program since XX/XX/XXXX. I have re-certified my employment annually as required by the program and made on-time payments. In XX/XX/XXXX, I enrolled in a XXXX XXXX program for which I took NO student loans and continued to make qualifying payments on my old loans. After about a year, I found out that although I had continued to receive a monthly bill ( and paid each month ), XXXX XXXX had placed my account in deferment without my permission because they received notice that I was in school. I immediately called, asked for the forms to be sent to me to nullify the deferment. I mailed and faxed these forms and was told that XXXX had not received them. I repeated the process and was told that the unauthorized deferment had been cancelled and ALL of the payments made in XX/XX/XXXX and XX/XX/XXXX would count as qualifying payments. I wrongly assumed this matter was closed. 

In XX/XX/XXXX, I submitted my employer certification form as I have annually. A typo on the date prevented the form from being submitted. I resubmitted the form and had my employer verbally confirm the information to XXXX over the phone. XXXX denied my application again and said it was incomplete, they needed information over the phone from my employer. I repeated the process and XXXX also contacted our HR department themselves. HR provided the necessary information again and still my re-certification was not approved because XXXX stated they had never spoken to my employer. Process was repeated again and finally in XX/XX/XXXX my employment was re-certified for the period of XX/XX/XXXX-XX/XX/XXXX. In the confirmation email, FedLoan stated they would MAIL me a letter telling me how many qualifying payments I had made. As of XX/XX/XXXX I still had not received that information.

On XX/XX/XXXX I called XXXX to ask why I hadn't received information outlining my number of qualifying payments. The agent said " it could still be processing, but I can tell you that you have made 34 qualifying payments. '' Given that I have been participating in PSLF for almost 5 years, I knew this was an incorrect calculation. I asked the agent to go over all of my payments with me. He found that XXXX had never counted my payments from the time I was in a XXXX program in XX/XX/XXXX-XX/XX/XXXX and filled out paperwork stating that I did not authorize XXXX to place my account in deferment and was told that the deferment was cancelled and ALL payments made during that period would be counted. This agent also told me there was a payment in XX/XX/XXXX that didn't count because it was XXXX cents ( not {$12.00}, XXXX cents ) less than it should have been. I really couldn't understand how that even happened and I generally pay a little extra on my TEACH grant ( which was turned into a loan ) each month so that didn't make sense to me. He told me he would submit that payment as well as the ones that were made during the period when XXXX placed a deferment on my account ( not authorized by me and they continued to send bills to me which I paid ) for review to have them applied to my qualifying payments. This customer service agent was very helpful, but he informed me that once this was sent to be reviewed, he couldn't give me any information on how it would be handled. Additionally, he told me this process would take 90 days to 6 months. This is unacceptable to me given the fact that I continue to make payments in good faith to this loan servicer, all the while my payments are not being counted because of clerical errors on their part. I have done my diligence in following up on every incident with XXXX in which I had a concern or needed to submit a document. I have been timely in my annual re-certification, timely with my payments, and I have continued to follow up with XXXX about the PSLF process for several years now to ensure that I am on the right track.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation