Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> Again that’s right in theory and what the banks report, however, individual law suits uncovered intentional efforts by the banks internally to force deferments and resetting the clock on IBR loan payers. Literally bank communication turned over in discovery on a number of lawsuits show instruction not to process annual reporting requirements, place the students in forebearance for a month, then process the documents.

There are no "banks" here. These are loan servicers acting at the federal government's direction.

If there is a problem with the loan servicers, then the federal government should retain different ones. That has nothing to do with whether the program works or should be different. (And if the federal government has failed to properly supervise the companies it hires to service its loans, why is the solution even more federal involvement?)

Here is a decent write about about 4 such student lawsuits...funny you mention the federal government, because as you will see in this article the Dept. Of Ed. Was involved in these efforts to reset the discharge clocks, because the program was going to cost them more than expected. Specifically right before the first batch of discharged loans the Dept of Ed changed their rules on the fly (in violation of the Act) to make students ineligible for discharge.

https://www.studentloanplanner.com/pslf-lawsuit/

Edit: I think In all 4 of these cases the Dept. Of Ed. Already approved these discharges, sent approval letters, then changed their rules and revoked the discharges. Again the rule changes were in violation of law and done because the costs of the program were so large.

If the government is can't be trusted to manage this I don't see how it can be argued that we need more government intervention to resolve the problem.

I don’t think I argued that government intervention was needed to resolve the problem.

However, going back to 7th grade civics our government is split into 3 branches to distribute power and provide checks and balances. In this very instance the judicial system (government) is the forum where these facts and bad acts of the government were uncovered and a judge (government employee) reinstated the discharge in 3 of the 4 cases cited.

> Judge Timothy J Kelly of the DC Circuit Court found that the original determination letters had language in them that seemed final, in contrast to the Department of Ed’s claim that it was provisional.

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