By Mary Mogan Edwards, The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS – Bill collectors and law firms working for the Ohio Attorney General’s office are tacking unreasonably high charges onto the amounts they try to collect from people with long-overdue student loans, according to lawsuits filed by the Legal Aid Society of Columbus.
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One man said he doesn’t even remember taking out loans totaling $900 in the early 1970s, but the state wants to add more than $1,500 in collection costs to the $2,368 he owes in principal, interest and late fees.
The society has filed lawsuits on behalf of four people who themselves were sued by Ohio State University last year. According to Legal Aid lawyer Scott Torguson, a law firm hired by Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office to sue for judgments against the four violated state and federal laws by demanding excessive collection costs.
The Legal Aid suits ask a court to award the debtors damages under the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and to establish that they owe less than the amount the state is demanding.
Ohio law doesn’t allow private creditors to make debtors pay collection costs, Torguson said. “But in these cases, where the plaintiff is the state of Ohio, collection costs of up to and above 70 percent are added to the amount claimed due,” he said. “This is an unreasonable burden to place on former students struggling to get on with their lives.”
Dan Tierney, spokesman for Attorney General Mike DeWine, said the office allows collection fees on debts owed to the state so that taxpayers don’t have to cover the cost. “We try to make (collecting debts) as cost-neutral as possible” to the state agencies that are owed money, he said.
Torguson complains, however, that the office gives little justification or explanation of the amounts charged, not to mention warning. “There is no possible way for students to know that they will be charged these fees when they take loans from the schools,” he said.
Andrew Coleman, a Northwest Side resident, attended Ohio State in 2004 and received a loan for $1,630 through the Perkins Loan Program, in which federal loans are channeled through a university.
Torguson said Coleman didn’t pay all of his loan back because he had financial difficulties. In 2012, OSU turned the debt over to the attorney general’s office for collection, certifying that Coleman owed $1,473 in principal, interest and late charges. When the attorney general’s office hired the law firm Mann & Carducci to sue Coleman in 2015, the firm added $1,054 in collection costs.