Senate Democrats press Education Department to rescind reviews of loan servicers
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and other Senate Democrats are asking the Department of Education to retract the findings from a review that its inspector general called “unsupported and inaccurate.”
Democratic lawmakers have been critical of the department’s audit of its student loan servicers, the middlemen who collect and apply payments to debt, conducted after the Justice Department fined Navient Solutions $60 million in 2014 for unlawfully charging active-duty service members high interest rates on student loans. The department said it would comb through the records of all its servicers to make sure the violations were not widespread, and later announced there was little evidence of wrongdoing.
A report released earlier this week by the inspector general challenged those findings and characterized the investigation as deeply flawed.
On Thursday, a group of Senate Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Richard Durbin (Ill.), sent a letter urging acting Education Secretary John B. King Jr. to rescind the review of the department’s four largest servicers — Navient, Great Lakes, Nelnet and American Education Services. The lawmakers want the department to conduct a full review to determine the number of service members who were unlawfully denied the right to have their student loan interest rate capped at six percent while on active duty between 2005 and 2014. They are essentially asking the department to redo the investigation and report back to the Senate Education and Veteran’s Affairs Committees.
The department, the senators said, has yet to identify and refund all military borrowers who were overcharged between 2009 and July 2014, the original Senate Democrats press Education Department to rescind reviews of loan servicers - The Washington Post: