#Middlebury #Veterans
Did you take out a Department of Veterans Affairs loan to buy a home between 2012 and 2017? Are you on VA disability? Did you pay extra fees on your loan? Pull out your loan documents and take a look. You could be due a refund.
The VA Office of the Inspector General did a review to see if the Veterans Benefits Administration was allowing veterans to be charged loan guaranty fees. OIG dug deep and determined that between 2012 and 2017, the VA collected $9.78 billion in fees. Of those, 72,900 fee-exempt veterans were hit for $286 million. Additionally, says the OIG, if the Loan Guaranty Service doesn’t get control of the situation, it could owe another $164 million over the next five years to 43,400 veterans.
This failure to refund went on even after the loan program learned in 2014 that some veterans were exempt from the fees. In 2016 the Loan Guaranty Service acknowledged that $150 million needed to be refunded. As of January 2019, nothing had been done.
The individual numbers are brutal. The amounts those 72,900 exempt veterans paid averaged $4,400 and go as high as $19,500. Some fees, the excuse was, happened when a veteran was not exempt at the time of the loan but became exempt later. Fair enough. But there were times where lenders claimed that refunds were applied to loan balances – but there was no documentation.
The OIG offered recommendations, but we know how that sometimes goes. The plan for action is to be finished by the end of July.
In short, there is a lot of fee money out there, and some of it might belong to you. Look at your loan docs. Sometimes the fee is paid up front; sometimes it’s rolled into the loan. Read through the OIG report at www.va.gov/oig/pubs/VAOIG-18-03250-130.pdf.
© 2019 King Features Synd. Inc.
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