Hours-long hold times with their student-loan company are keeping public servants in a 'limbo period' wondering if they'll get the debt relief they qualify for

• Student-loan borrowers in public service have reported issues reaching their loan company, MOHELA.
• Insider spoke to two borrowers who said they were on the phone for hours to no avail.

Instead of celebrating the launch of President Joe Biden's student-loan forgiveness application earlier this month, Nathan was sitting in his Washington, DC home spending three hours on hold with MOHELA, the company that services his loans.

As a Marine Corps veteran, Nathan — who requested his last name be withheld for privacy — wanted to be sure he was taking advantage of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after ten years of qualifying payments. MOHELA now manages the full PSLF portfolio, and all Nathan wanted to do was confirm with the company that the payments he made while serving would count toward forgiveness.

But what should have been a simple task turned into a time-consuming ordeal that has yet to be resolved.

"The first time I tried to call was a 144 minute estimated wait time," Nathan, 29, told Insider. "The second time I called was a 149 minute wait. And then most recently, I tried to call and it was 50 minutes. And each of these times I didn't have time to wait. I thought it would be a quicker call. And one time I stayed on the call for nearly three hours."

Nathan still hasn't been able to reach a representative to help him ensure his PSLF payments are up to date, and it's leaving him in a bind with just days to make use of a PSLF waiver expiring on October 31 that allows past payments, including those previously deemed ineligible, to count toward forgiveness progress.

He's not alone — many borrowers have taken to Twitter to speak out on the long wait times and inability to get simple questions answered from their loan companies.

While MOHELA did not respond to a request for comment, Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance — a group representing federal loan servicers — told Insider that companies do not have control over how they are staffed and how quickly they can help borrowers.

"The [Education] Department decides how much resources and how much staff they're going to pay to have on the phones," Buchanan said. "They've adjusted that some but they choose the sort of level of customer service they want us to provide here by number one, how much information they give us, but also number two, what the resources are they give us. And so this is sort of not surprising in the sense of, if the department doesn't provide any additional financial resources, there's no ability to provide additional staff."

Regardless of who is to blame for the long hold times, it's leaving Nathan in a financially precarious situation.

"I'm in this limbo period not really knowing what's going on with my student loans," he said. "I'm not even trying to call and ask about the student loan forgiveness. I just want to know simple things."

'It became virtually impossible to reach them'

Kate is facing a similar dilemma. As a public servant in Alabama, she said she's about six years into her PSLF progress, and after her loans were transferred over to MOHELA, it was time for her to recertify that her employer was in a public service field. So she filled out the same form she had been sending in for years and wanted to confirm MOHELA received it, but she said "it became virtually impossible to reach them."

"They dumped me into some kind of a loop where the automated phone service would say, 'we seem to be having some kind of a problem,' over and over," Kate, 40, told Insider. She requested her last name be withheld for privacy. "So I called in a few times over multiple days to see if that problem got worked out and I would eventually get through to somebody, but that never happened."

After attempting to reach a representative, Kate said she later got a notice that her employer had not filled out the required information for recertification, which she said was incorrect, but still has not been able to reach MOHELA to resolve that issue. Now, her plan of action is resubmitting the form and hoping this time, it will be processed.

"Some of these payments are part of the temporary waiver that's expiring, and if I can't get through before the expiration date, then I lose the opportunity to get these additional payments counted towards my public service loan forgiveness, which is concerning," Kate said. "And that goes beyond just some technical error to a real problem that may not be able to be fixed later if I miss a deadline, because I can't get through to them."

Aissa Canchola Bañez, senior advisor for policy and strategy at advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center, told Insider that borrowers experiencing these challenges should be filing complaints with the Education Department.

"The best way that we can change these practices is shedding light on just how egregious and how systemic some of these servicing failures are on MOHELA's part," she said.

Keeping track of all of her documents and noting when she called MOHELA, and for how long, is what Kate plans to do to prove she made every attempt to submit her paperwork before the deadline.

'Restarting payments is a massive concern'

Neither Kate nor Nathan know how much they will have to pay monthly once student-loan payments resume in January. Nathan said that he spoke to his previous loan servicer last year regarding his monthly payments, and they told him that without an income-driven repayment plan, he could be paying around $900 a month.

"Restarting payments is a massive concern," Nathan said. "$900 a month is not really feasible and would be extremely detrimental because that's just so much money."

While the student-loan payment pause has been extended numerous times, Biden made clear that the pause through the end of December is final, and borrowers should prepare to restart payments in January 2023. Along with rolling out the student-loan forgiveness application process, which borrowers have until December 2023 to complete, the administration also proposed a new income-driven repayment plan that would make monthly payments more affordable.

Canchola Bañez said that Biden's "bold action" to help borrowers "is an opportunity for us to really make sure that the student loan servicing system works in the way that it was intended, and in the way that provides borrowers the protections that they are entitled to under federal law."

While Nathan and Kate are grateful for the broad debt relief, their primary concern is ensuring their time spent working in public service is accounted for.

"The fact that I'm just stonewalled and uncertain about my financial future, while inflation and my rent is going going up... I don't know what I can do in the near future," Nathan said.