Report: Education Dept. Unable to Manage Wage-Garnishment System
Katherine Knott
December 16, 2022
Advocates are calling on the Education Department to shut down its system for wage garnishment until it can be deployed lawfully.
The Education Department failed to control its debt collection system during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to thousands of people having their wages illegally garnished, a new report finds.
The department’s failure to stop wage garnishment once student loan payments paused, as directed by Congress, has been the subject of lawsuits and an inspector general report. But the Student Borrower Protection Center found in the report released Thursday that the problem persisted longer than previously known, through at least August 2021—18 months after Congress passed a set of student loan relief policies as part of the CARES Act.
