A numbers game?

Ballard Spahr LLP
Contact

In written testimony for his appearance before the House Financial Services Committee yesterday, CFPB Director Cordray advised that the CFPB has received “thousands of student loan complaints.” When we sorted the student loan complaints in the CFPB complaint data base, we came up with 5,993 complaints. That might sound like a lot but it’s worth noting that there were over 38.8 million borrowers with outstanding student loans as of the end of 2012, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. So we’re talking about roughly 154 complaints for every one million borrowers.

Not only are we unimpressed by the volume of complaints, our review of the complaint database left us a bit perplexed. We compared the number of complaints mentioned in the second Annual Report of the CFPB Student Loan Ombudsman with the number of complaints shown in the CFPB complaint data base. According to the Executive Summary in the Report, the CFPB received approximately 3,800 private student loan complaints during the period from October 1, 2012 through September 30, 2013. But when we looked at the complaint data base, we could only find 2,813 complaints received by the CFPB during that period. The CFPB’s website says that complaints are removed if they don’t meet the publication criteria. But 1,000 complaints?  So we’re wondering, where did we (or the CFPB) go wrong? Anybody know?

DISCLAIMER: Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations. Attorney Advertising.

© Ballard Spahr LLP

Written by:

Ballard Spahr LLP
Contact
more
less

PUBLISH YOUR CONTENT ON JD SUPRA NOW

  • Increased visibility
  • Actionable analytics
  • Ongoing guidance

Ballard Spahr LLP on:

Reporters on Deadline

"My best business intelligence, in one easy email…"

Your first step to building a free, personalized, morning email brief covering pertinent authors and topics on JD Supra:
*By using the service, you signify your acceptance of JD Supra's Privacy Policy.
Custom Email Digest
- hide
- hide