CFPB Publishes Report on Student Loan Complaints, Issues Income-Driven Repayment Fix It Form

CFPB Student Lending Consumer Complaints

On August 18, the CFPB published a report to provide a midyear update on student loan complaints, focusing on “problems for borrowers who submit an application to enroll in or recertify income and family size under an income-driven-repayment (IDR) plan.” The report analyzes student borrower complaints related to IDR plans and offers recommendations to “address the challenges identified in [those] complaints.” The report analyzes complaints submitted from October 1, 2015 through May 31, 2016 and finds that “borrowers encounter obstacles when submitting applications for IDR plans, including poor customer service, unexpected delays, lost paperwork, and inconsistent or inaccurate application processing.” The CFPB recommends that student loan servicers take “immediate action” to address challenges with IDR processing, highlighting the policy guidance recently issued by the Department of Education as a “roadmap to strengthen practices related to the handling of IDR applications” and releasing an IDR Application Fix It Form (Fix It Form). Developed by the CFPB, the Fix It Form is a prototype that can be adopted by servicers seeking to adopt the recommendations in the report and is designed to “document[] any deficiencies with borrowers’ IDR applications and communicates to borrowers about how to address the deficiencies and get their applications back on track.”