Clampdown on federal student debt leads to small bump in collections
OTTAWA — A concerted effort by federal officials to round up more money from student loan borrowers who defaulted has yielded a small increase in collections.
The Canada Revenue Agency says it was able to collect $208.8 million this year, about $10 million more than it did two years ago when the government decided that loan writeoffs had spun out of control and collection efforts needed to ramp up.
The year-over-year increases, though, have been relatively small: a two-per-cent increase between 2014 and 2015, and a three-per-cent increase between last year and this one.
Those increases are smaller than the 4.5-per-cent increase in collections between 2013 and 2014 when the agency and the department in charge of the student loan regime began sharing more information to aid in collection efforts.