GAO Found 4 of 5 Federal Loan Servicers Failed Accuracy Standards, but the Department Stopped Auditing Them Entirely in 2025

A March 2026 GAO report (GAO-26-108534) found that four of the five federal student loan servicers failed to meet the Department of Education's performance standards for record accuracy, and that the Office of Federal Student Aid stopped assessing servicers on accuracy and call quality entirely in 2025 after losing 46% of its workforce (from 1,433 to 777 staff), meaning there is currently no federal oversight ensuring that the payment counts, balances, and repayment plan assignments of 43 million borrowers are correct. Why it matters: if servicer records are inaccurate, borrowers can be placed in wrong repayment plans or billed incorrect amounts, so borrowers approaching IDR or PSLF forgiveness (after 20-25 years or 120 payments) may have their qualifying payment counts wrong, so they could be denied forgiveness they earned or forced to pay years longer than required, so without audits there is no mechanism to detect or correct these errors at scale, so the entire federal student loan system is operating on an honor system with servicers who have already demonstrated they cannot be trusted. The structural root cause is that FSA's staffing was gutted through a combination of hiring freezes, early retirement incentives, and RIF actions in 2025, and there is no statutory minimum staffing level for student loan oversight, so the oversight function can be effectively eliminated through administrative action alone.