Today on this Tax Day, the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) has released Voices of Despair: How Seizing the EITC Is Leaving Student Loan Borrowers Homeless and Hopeless During a Pandemic. The updated report builds on a 2018 NCLC report that compiled stories from dozens of borrowers recounting the hardship caused by the federal government’s […]

Defaulted student loan borrowers planning to file their taxes should know that any refund they were expecting will likely wind up at the Department of Education (ED) instead of their bank account. Tax refund offsets are one of the powerful tools the government uses to collect defaulted federal student loans. For many struggling student loan borrowers, […]

This week, the National Consumer Law Center updated its policy brief highlighting the need to end the seizure of Earned Income Tax Credits (“EITC”) from defaulted federal student loan borrowers. As we have said in previous blog posts (here and here), seizing EITC payments is a counterproductive policy.  The EITC is extremely important to working […]

This morning, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a scathing letter to the U.S. Department of Education highlighting some troubling data about the way that the Department  treated Corinthian Colleges borrowers eligible for fast track relief. The Department announced that these borrowers were eligible for relief after finding that nearly 100 Corinthian campuses (operating as WyoTech, […]

It has been one month since tax season came to an end. By now, many student loan borrowers have learned the hard way that the federal government will take their tax refund, including Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC), if they are in default on a federal loan.  A couple of months ago, we shared a […]