The Trump administration has appointed a longtime student loan industry executive to be the federal government’s top watchdog for the $1.5-trillion student loan market.
Robert Cameron will serve as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new student loan ombudsman, the bureau said Friday. The job was designed to protect student loan borrowers from poor practices in the student loan industry. It’s one of the few jobs explicitly named in the Dodd-Frank Act, the law passed after the 2008 financial crisis that created the CFPB. It’s considered the go-to office for borrowers who have complaints about their loans.
Cameron most recently worked at the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, better known as Fed Loan Servicing, as its head of compliance and risk mitigation. That agency has been cited for poor industry practices, most notably for how it has handled the, designed to allow student loan borrowers who work in public service jobs to get part of their loan balances forgiven.
A report by the Department of Education’s Inspector General’s Office released this year found that Fed Loan employees received a “fail” grade on interactions with borrowers 11% of the time, far more than the industry average of 4%.The CFPB’s student loan ombudsman position has been vacant for nearly a year. Seth Frotman, an Obama administration appointee,
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