Student-loan borrowers are facing payment errors and customer service delays. A new federal report offers a solution.

Your student-loan servicer wants much thief carrying retired the sweeping changes from the Department of Education.

The Government Accountability Office released a report connected Thursday that delved into the coordination betwixt 4 national student-loan servicers and the Education Department. It recovered that the servicers — Nelnet, Aidvantage, MOHELA, and EdFinancial — reported challenges implementing programme changes from the department, citing a "lack of clear up-front instruction" that has sometimes led to "extensive back-and-forth," the study said.

The deficiency of clear instructions has caused delays successful communicating pinch borrowers, starring to administrative errors and incorrect billing accusation that return clip for the servicer to remedy.

"The instruction Education provides to servicers connected changes to the student indebtedness programme is captious to ensuring soft operations and bully customer work for these borrowers," the study said.

The GAO recommended that the Federal Student Aid agency create criteria for determining erstwhile it should initiate early conversations pinch servicers to hole for coming changes, peculiarly those that are analyzable aliases request to beryllium implemented wrong a tight timeframe.

One servicer told the GAO that the section gave it 1 business time to update really borrowers tin way their full number of payments toward indebtedness forgiveness, leaving insufficient clip to hole for an influx of calls astir the change.

The Education Department said successful its consequence to the GAO's study that it disagreed pinch the proposal to create criteria for early coordination pinch servicers. Mell Brittian-Smith, acting executive head of the Office of Loan Portfolio Management, said that establishing a general criterion would "be fraught pinch challenges and risks," fixed that complexity for indebtedness and repayment changes tin vary.

"The Department coordinates pinch the servicers arsenic quickly arsenic imaginable fixed the disposable timeframes and different qualitative criteria pertaining to the change," Brittian-Smith said.

A section charismatic besides told the GAO successful December 2025 that it proactively requested input from servicers connected draught changes related to caller repayment plans, allowing the section to revise requests and easiness the implementation process.

Over the past month, national servicers person been tasked pinch implementing President Donald Trump's sweeping student-loan repayment overhaul, which included caller income-driven repayment plans and borrowing caps. Borrowers person reported a range of challenges related to the changes, including incorrect costs accusation and agelong clasp times pinch customer service.

Servicer challenges, however, predate the Trump administration. Under erstwhile President Joe Biden, servicers were tasked pinch facilitating a return to repayment pursuing the pandemic-era pause. Biden's Education Department later penalized servicers for failing to meet their contractual obligations, including delivering inaccurate billing statements to borrowers.

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