Consumer complaint received 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Received bad information about your loan
Company: MOHELA
State: TX

Complaint narrative:
Mohela has mishandled my PSLF for over a year. They have denied my PSLF because of lack of qualifying payments even though I have more than double the amount of qualifying payments needed. Mohela makes it very difficult to get through the phone system in order to reach someone to resolve the complaint. You go through phone systems that bring you to an endless loop and also put you on hold for extended periods of time. When you speak to a representative, they are not able to answer your questions. For example, I requested an accounting of qualifying payments so I can better understand what payments were and were not counted towards my forgiveness but the representative was unable to help me. I requested to speak to supervisor, but they will no longer allow you to speak to one. They put you on a long hold and then you get to an automated system that doesn't work correctly - I sent a message to mohela about this and they responded that I would get a call back but never did. A company needs to provide a path for escalation. They also mishandled my forbearance paperwork. I technically should have only been on forbearance for a month. They put me on forbearance after I was put on the SAVE program even though I do not have a current payment. If I have XXXX payment, no forbearance is needed. I have spent countless hours trying reach Mohela and countless hours on the phone trying to get my loans forgiven, but Mohela continues to give me the runaround without any avenue for resolution. The qualifying payment count Mohela has is incorrect but they do no provide an avenue for correction. I am not sure how Mohela does not provide an avenue to correct errors. They continue to delay my PSLF, because they stand to make money not discharging my loans given that I had to move my loans to Mohela in order to qualify for the PSLF exception. This has been going on since XX/XX/XXXX. Mohela mentioned to me the only way for me to get my payments counted is through the FSA IDR process which they told me would be complete by end of XXXX and then I had to wait until then. I waited until the end of XXXX and then reached out to Mohela and they further delayed it again and stated that I had to wait until XXXX of XXXX for the IDR process to complete. I don't even know why they even stated this, because I believe that this information is incorrect as I believe the IDR process has probably been completed by now. Mohela is continually trying to delay my forgiveness and in the mean time, repayments have technically restarted. It seems that Mohela doesn't want to take responsibility for correcting any errors and wants to point the finger at FSA and say it's out of their hands. There is a lot more that I could complain about over the past year working with Mohela, but at this point I would just like Mohela to correctly count all my payments. I have also sent a secure messages in which Mohela did not respond within the time period stated they would respond. Also their response was the following : Our records indicate that you have already called and spoken to one of our Customer Service Representatives regarding this inquiry. We will assume the inquiry has been handled. 

I am not sure why they would assume that my inquiry was resolved. The whole point was that customer service is unable to resolve my issue. My next message stated that I was unable to reach a supervisor and also that it took several hours of being looped and transferred and three phone calls in one day to try to put in a request for a supervisor to call me back and their response was that someone would call me, but no one ever did. So their response to secure messaging is sincerely lacking. No service at all and nothing gets resolved.

I have uploaded to Mohela 's document upload system for PSLF 2 documents. 1 is Mohelas denial of PSLF for lack of qualifying payments. the second document is from my loan servicer showing I have over 230 out of the 120 qualifying payments needed for forgiveness. I have also sent a secure message requesting that mohela review these documents. These payments should be reviewed under the PSLF exception

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