Skip to main content

DeVos and Mnuchin Sued for Seizing Tax Refunds of Student Debtors

How cruel can Betsy DeVos and Steven Mnuchin be? As people of great wealth and privilege, they have not a thought for those who have been impoverished by the pandemic.

Both have been sued in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of student debtors whose tax refunds they sought to garnish.

Jessica Corbett writes in Common Dreams:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the federal departments they run were hit with a class-action lawsuit Friday for illegal seizures of thousands of student borrowers’ tax refunds during the coronavirus pandemic, which has left over 40 million Americans jobless and familes across the country struggling to stay in their homes and keep food on the table.

The suit (pdf)—filed by Student Defense and Democracy Forward in the U.S. District Court for D.C.—accuses the Education and Treasury departments of violating the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) Act from late March, which halted all involuntary collection of federal student loans, including tax refund offsets, until the end of September.

“Secretaries DeVos and Mnuchin have inflicted needless financial pain on student borrowers and their families by failing to stop the illegal seizures of their tax refunds,” Democracy Forward senior counsel Jeffrey Dubner said in a statement.

“The turmoil caused by the ongoing pandemic is no excuse for breaking the law,” Dubner added. “Our class-action suit seeks to hold the administration accountable so that student borrowers can stay on their feet during this crisis.”



Udimi - Buy Solo Ads from Diane Ravitch's blog https://ift.tt/2XgMBZa
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Author discusses book on grad school

Graduate school is a great mystery to students, and to some faculty members, says Jessica McCrory Calarco, the author of A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (Princeton University Press). Calarco is an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University. She believes many faculty members (as well as graduate students, of course) will benefit from her book. She responded to questions via email. Q: How did you get the idea to write this book? Why did the issue speak to you? A: This book started as a tweet . Or, rather, as a series of tweets about the hidden curriculum of higher ed. Ph.D. student Kristen K. Smith had tweeted about the need to better educate undergrads about grad school opportunities, and it made me think about how opportunities in academe are often hidden from grad students, as well. Reflecting on my own experiences in grad school, I thought about the many times I'd found myself embarrassed because of what I didn't know -- the ...

Bad Education: A Movie Review

"It's not having what you want," quips Roslyn Assistant Superintendent Pam Gluckin in her Long Island accent, "it's wanting what you got." And what educators got from HBO's Bad Education was a harrowing detail of a pair of school administrators gone rogue with the school district's treasury, sacking $11.2 million before they were caught... by [...] from The Educators Room https://ift.tt/3d5LaSu via IFTTT

Tips and Strategies for Remote Learning (March 2020)

For the past four weeks, starting two weeks before our Spring Break last week, teachers, administrators and staff at our school have been preparing for “remote school” for students as a result of the coronavirus / COVID-19 crisis. On March 19, 2020, our Head of School sent out a letter to our parents including information about our remote learning plans and FAQs for parents . If your school is currently preparing for remote learning ( as all Oklahoma public school districts now appear to be , pending tomorrow’s state school board meeting vote) I encourage you to review these publicly shared documents and information. As our school’s “Technology Integration and Innovation Specialist” this year, I’ve been building an instructional site for our teachers to support remote learning, on support.casady.org , which is openly licensed CC-BY . This collaborative effort with many other teachers and members of our school staff has provided a good opportunity to curate as well as present instruc...