Consumer complaint received 2024-08-23 00:00:00
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Problem with customer service
Company: MOHELA
State: IN

Complaint narrative:
On XX/XX/XXXX I submitted a direct consolidation loan application with an IDR request attached to the application through the FSA portal to be sent to my lender, Mohela. The loan consolidation was approved and taken care of quickly, but my IDR request was never processed. I was placed on an additional administrative forbearance that was set to end in XX/XX/XXXX to allow extra time for processing this IDR request. In XX/XX/XXXX, I submitted another IDR request form separately through the Mohela website to attempt to rectify the situation and it was just labelled as a duplicate form and was never processed. In XX/XX/XXXX, I called Mohela because the request had still not been processed and my loan was set to come out of forbearance. They extended my forbearance until the end of XXXX to allow more time. On XX/XX/XXXX, I called Mohela again as my IDR request had still not been processed. The representative I spoke to this time told me that they had paused the IDR request while the loan consolidation was being processed and no one had re-activated review of my IDR request. This representative told me that she had pushed my IDR request back into the system, which is reflected in my " documents received '' section of my Mohela portal. She also told me that she would apply an additional administrative forbearance to my account which would end at the end of XX/XX/XXXX to allow time for the IDR request to process. This forbearance was never reflected in my portal so over the course of a week before my forbearance was set to end again in XX/XX/XXXX, I had to call multiple times attempting to get through to a representative to confirm that I did not have a payment due on XX/XX/XXXX because my IDR had still not been processed. The representative I was able to speak to on XX/XX/XXXX told me my forbearance had been requested, not implemented, but will take approximately 60-75 days to process, which means I would not event get news of my forbearance being approved until it was set to expire. I requested proof of this in writing to ensure that I had it in case I was then considered to have missed payments and the representative told me that they are only allowed to send us a specific list of things and this was not one of them, so I can not see that this request was submitted, nor do I have anything in writing to prove that it was in their system. I was also told during this phone call that there is a system error causing Mohela to not be able to process my IDR and they're trying to resolve that, but this was not told to me over the last several months of trying to get this sorted out. 
I had submitted complaints with Mohela representatives on the phone and on my XX/XX/XXXX meeting, the representative sent me to the FSA complaint form which I submitted on XX/XX/XXXX. A majority of this report comes from that complaint. Mohela finally processed my IDR in XXXX, and I can't track when exactly that was processed because they switched service platforms this summer and, conveniently, all my previous documents were lost with that portal. FSA did not get back to me regarding my complaint until XXXX as well, after Mohela finally reviewed my IDR. Their response was basically that Mohela 's records indicate the issue was fixed and nothing needed to be done. Throughout this entire process, I was unable to make qualifying payments toward my loans for PSLF because the payment plan my loans were on did not count, so I have been accruing interest on loans that have been kicked down the curb for almost a full year which means I will be in more debt, longer, because of Mohela 's mismanagement of my account, documents, and poor customer service.

Company public response: Company believes it acted appropriately as authorized by contract or law
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation