I have student loans serviced by Navient. Every three or four months I start getting calls from them that I’m past due, even though I have automatic payments set up to pay more than my minimums every month. They always take a look, apologize for the error, explain that it’s due to an unavoidable problem with how bill pay checks are cut and processed, and fix everything.
I honestly attributed it to basic incompetence, but that’s because I thought that a company being that obviously and blatantly criminal in their behavior risked meaningful sanction. In retrospect, I can see that that was naive.
I just checked over the history of my account, and over the past few years they’ve charged me$1300 in late fees, that if I hadn’t been such a stubborn ass in making them fix would have just been free money to them.
How on earth is this company still in business?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-navient_us_56b7a886e4b01d80b246b214
A Pun Involving Travel 
Because they can. This is why the financial industry needs shrinking.
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That is fraud and oh god I agree with Clinton.
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For the record, I’ll be contacting the NYS Attorney General’s office with an official complaint after this week, and particularly last night’s harassing phone calls and manipulative tactics.
Here’s why I suspect it’s not really a system problem – As soon as I mentioned that I’d be contacting the AG, they were able to correct the misapplications without a problem.
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Mike Jurney
It’s sort of a system problem. I would bet good money that no one sat down and wrote a spec saying explicitly “We want to charge fraudulent late fees.” They just said “make sure there are no situations where we miss charging a fee we could collect” and any bug or ambiguity that happens to get the company money it’s not legally entitled to, well, that bug somehow isn’t as high on the fix list as any bug that loses the company money it thinks it is legally entitled to. Sure, any ethical designer would insist that the code roll back any fees found to have been charged in error without requiring a complaint or legal action, but gee, since they tell everyone to check their statements carefully blah blah.
And there’s the problem: if they charge money they’re not entitled to, the worst that can happen is they have to give it back. I would love to see a world where every “screwup” resulting in overcharges to consumers resulted in the same kinds of late fees, interest and penalties that companies charge when consumers underpay (or pay on time and the company screws up.)
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