Left hand, meet the right hand.
As some of you know, I paid for most of my college tuition through military benefit programs. One of these programs was the FTA1, which involve federal funds that are approved and paid at each state's National Guard headquarters. Unlike the GI Bill, which is paid directly to the student, the FTA is sent to the college and posted to the student's account. Unfortunately, they are always slow to release the funds, so I paid my tuition out of pocket each semester, and then got a refund when the Guard sent the money.
In my final semester, I paid the money as usual, and when the college received notice that my FTA payment was approved, they sent me my check. There was one problem, though: the money never made it to the college. I got a notice in the mail last October, five months after graduating, that my sponsor had failed to pay and that I now owed a semester's tuition (again).
I knew the guy at NCSU who handles tuition assistance with the Guard and Reserve; I had a similar problem a couple years earlier that he helped me clear up. I stopped by his cube after I got the letter to see what happened: apparently, my payment was one of several that the Guard had managed to mail to the wrong address.
He kept working on the issue, and I stopped by the Guard headquarters a few times myself, but it's pretty tough to break through the bureaucracy. I considered paying the bill while I waited for a resolution, but he told me the balance wouldn't be a problem for me. True to his word, I got a new invoice each month with a different due date, pushed out further so it wouldn't actually come due.
But he's been transferred to another department, and now I'm getting late fees and interest posted to my student account. As if this wasn't enough, I got a notice the other day from the NC Department of Revenue. Since NCSU is a state school, my state tax refund has been seized and applied to my "debt."
Meanwhile, a simple stop payment and re-issue of an outstanding check has taken close to a year.
It's a good thing the VA sent me that $5 bill last week, or I'd be in real trouble!
1 An amusing choice of acronym; it actually stands for "federal tuition assistance," though the same acronym is commonly used to say "fuck the Army."
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ducttapeavenger) wrote,
nauseated
