SFA Community Newsletter 6/13/2001

The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) recently praised SFA for our methods of debt collection and they are using SFA as an example of "best practices" for debt collection purposes.

GAO said SFA's collection process is further advanced than other agencies. For example, SFA has implemented the withholding of money from a defaulter's paycheck. Those garnished wages are then applied to the defaulter's unpaid loans, thereby lowering their debt.

The review of "best practices" stems from the 1996 Debt Collection Improvement Act and will be part of GAO's report to the House Government Reform Committee in September.

On June 20 & 21, SFA's Financial Partners Channel will partner with New York State Higher Education Services Corporation to sponsor the Eastern Regional Default Aversion Conference in Albany, NY.

The conference forum will include roundtable discussions with guarantee agencies and invited guests from the Eastern Region. These groups will discuss the best methods of default aversion. This information-sharing conference demonstrates SFA's respect for and commitment to our partners and our continued improvement with helping students to prevent defaulting on their loans.

It's anticipated that other default aversion conferences will be scheduled for SFA's regional offices in San Francisco, Dallas and Chicago but those dates have not been determined yet.

SFA will showcase FAFSA on the Web and Students.gov as part of a joint Department of Education effort at the National Educational Computing Conference, to be held in Chicago on June 25-27.

The conference, the biggest Education Technical exhibit in the world, will be attended by thousands of educators from across the globe that will converge to explore the opportunities and innovations of education in the 21st century. The conference includes speakers, workshops, and a mass network of educational professionals designed to learn, exchange, and survey the progress being made in the field of educational technology.

Greg Woods, SFA's Chief Operating Officer, and other managers and staff from SFA and the Office of Postsecondary Education will be speaking and presenting at the annual NASFAA conference at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, TN, on July 22-25, 2001.

To visit SFA's exhibit, go to the back right of the exhibit hall and look for booth 621. Come talk with staff about our school efforts and learn how we help put America through school.

Complete information about the conference can be found on NASFAA's Web site: http://www.nasfaa.org/SubHomes/AnnualConference2001/index.html.

The Office of Acquisitions and Contract Performance hosted "Phase II" of its on-going Contract Transformation Initiative during the week of May 29. The initiative is intended to "transform" government procurements to allow contracts that are clearer, cost-effective, and provides for quality expectations and performance by the contractor.

SFA and teams of Operating Partners set the framework for significant savings and quality improvement on SFA's Virtual Data Center contract with Computer Sciences Corporation and the Direct Loan Servicing contract with ACS. Savings will begin to accrue as early as September 30, 2001 and will eventually assist SFA in meeting its goal of reaching a 19 percent unit price reduction by 2004, as well as increasing customer and employee satisfaction levels.

As of May 31, SFA has collected over $57 million as a result of receiving HHS' National Directory of New Hires (NDNH) data. Since this computer matching partnership with HHS began in January, new information has been received on 690,621 accounts, with unpaid loan balances totaling approximately $3,209,718,229.

On May 24, results of SFA's second match with HHS' NDNH database was calculated. SFA sought to match 1.25 million collection records against HHS' database. Almost half of the records were from our partner guarantors. The match produced data on 461,728 SFA and guaranty agency accounts, with unpaid loan balances totaling approximately $1,181,255,690.