CNN —
The Department of Education announced it will use “secret shoppers” to help monitor the student loan repayment process, as payments for millions of borrowers restarted last month following a pause during the Covid-19 pandemic that lasted more than three years.
If errors are so frequent that secret shoppers can find them there are systemic problems that need to be addressed. This isn’t a grocery store.
I think the point of the program is for the DOE to actively look for problems instead of having to wait for people to report their problems to them. Isn’t this them trying to address those problems?
Yeah, my comment was more cynical than it probably needed to be. I guess my point was more that I hope they thought this through but it seems like encountering problems through random chance seems unlikely to find most of the problems being encountered. Secret shoppers will make up a fraction of a percent of all transactions so it seems unlikely that they will make a significant impact unless the problems are very pervasive.
I agree that I hope they’ve thought this through and we’re all not reading an article five years from now about how the DOE wasted a bunch of time and resources doing “secret shopping” and it didn’t result in anything.
You’re answering in good faith, which is less common here than even on reddit, you’ll likely only get replies regurgitating cynical takes and memes unfortunately.
I’ve noticed lemmy tends to skew more extreme than reddit did. But I’ll just keep on doing me and they can keep on doing them.