My husband is currently trying to remove the "derogatory information" pertaining to a student loan that he defaulted on and has since rehabilitated. He's been working with an ombudsman from the DOE on this. I've been doing a lot of reading on this board and wanted to ask about some issues that I haven't seen addressed. 1-How long is typical for a case to last, from the ombudsman contacting you about your case, to conclusion? How long after being contacted by the ombudsman should he expect her to be contacting the lender he is in dispute with? 2-Is it typical to not receive phone calls with updates about your case? The person assigned to my husband's case will promise to call "tomorrow" with an update after she speaks to the lender. "Tomorrow" will pass with no phone call, and then my husband will try to call her the next few days and only get voice mail. When he finally catches her again (a week or two later), she still has no update, and hasn't spoken to the lender. While I understand that they are busy, we're starting to get really frustrated and are wondering if this is the norm (fine, we just want to know), or if we are dealing with someone giving him the runaround. The info on his credit report he wants removed are some late payments from before the loan went into default, and some (small but credit damaging) unpaid "balances" that he was never notified about. (We suspect that they were the fees from when his loan went into default and sold to a new servicer) He spoke to the original lender before contacting the DOE, and they told him that they show a zero balance now for his account (which again, was since sold to another servicer). They sent him a letter stating this and also a printout of his account history. When he disputed this with the one credit bureau that was reporting this info, it came back as "verified by lender". Since the lender seems willing to work with him, I'm thinking maybe he should just contact them again on his own, read some of the sections from the HEA to them, and see if they will just take care of this for him, but we don't want to jeopardize the process he's currently going through with the DOE. Thanks in advance for any input!!
