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The program will be in effect for one year once student loan repayment relief ends, currently Aug. 31, and will restore access to repayment options and federal student aid eligibility, plus limit collections during that time and remove some defaults from credit reports.
Following this, many of the people affected have struggled to get through to the Department’s Debt Management team because of the high volume of calls to the service. This has, quite understandably, caused them a significant amount of worry and, in some cases, distress. In a written PQ answer of December 10, the Minister for Welfare Delivery said that Debt Management agents had answered 78 percent of calls in November 2020, compared to the Department’s target of answering 90 percent. These figures do not, however, include all calls to the system. The answer also explained that some calls do not “make it into the system”: at the height of the recent problems, an average of over 51,000 calls were blocked per day.