re: Subject Line: Your Student Loans Have Been Forgiven

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Do you know any of the details? What does the statute say about loan forgiveness and what were the administrative failures?

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The Department of Education on Friday announced that it will forgive the debts of 804,000 people, an effort to fix what it calls "administrative failures" that denied student loan borrowers relief they were eligible for under their repayment plans.

Those 804,000 borrowers are people who have been paying their loans back through income-driven repayment plans, which allow debts to be forgiven once they've been paid for 20 or 25 years, depending on the plan.

But because of errors in tracking payments, officials said, many borrowers have been left paying well beyond their payment end-dates.

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Though there are multiple types of income-driven repayment plans offered by the Department of Education, they all have the same goal: set a borrower's monthly payment based on their income and cancel any remaining loans after 20 to 25 years of payments.

Friday's debt relief for over 800,000 people acknowledges that the second part of the plan -- cancellation -- often isn't happening, an issue that has also been well-documented by government watchdogs.

In 2022, the Government Accountability Office wrote that "the Department of Education has had trouble tracking borrowers' payments and hasn't done enough to ensure that all eligible borrowers receive the forgiveness to which they are entitled."

"We found thousands of borrowers still in repayment who could be eligible for forgiveness now," the GAO, a nonpartisan watchdog, wrote in its report.

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