Oregon student loan debtors breathed a sigh of relief this week when the Department of Education announced that it was finally firing five debt collection agencies that had been giving inaccurate information to student borrowers. I say finally firing these agencies because the department had been under fire for years for its partnership with these agencies and its insistence on paying them roughly a billion a year to harass student loan borrowers.

The Department of Education ultimately found that Pioneer Credit, one of their largest collection partners, and four others had been regularly doling out inaccurate information about the department’s loan forgiveness program.  Due to incentive-pay structures, the debt collectors had little incentive to rout student loan debtors into loan forgiveness programs and often misinformed debtors to keep them outside the loan forgiveness programs.