When nine refund checks landed in his mailbox a few months ago, Jed Shafer figured he was finally done with his student loan.

He had spent years struggling to get the loan forgiveness that federal law provides for public servants like him, and those checks from the United States Treasury covered what he’d paid beyond his obligation. His loan balance was officially zero.

But he’s not done, not by a long shot.

Earlier this month, he went into Lowe’s to buy a new refrigerator and applied for a store credit card to get a 10 percent discount. He was turned down on the spot.

FedLoan, the loan servicer for public servants in the forgiveness program, had given him a little parting gift: A delinquency report to the scorekeepers at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion that effectively wrecked his credit.

Mr. Shafer was not late with his payments, though the three bureaus had him marked 120 to 180 days tardy. In fact, he had made extra payments in a bend-over-backward effort to make himself bulletproof in the eyes of the federal government and its agents. It didn’t work.

We should not be the least bit surprised, either. The public service loan forgiveness program is an administrative debacle, as I’ve chronicled for a couple of years now — just by following Mr. Shafer, who has devoted his career to teaching at-risk teens in Eugene, Ore.

The forgiveness program is just one part of a fundamentally broken student loan servicing system, as the Department of Education’s own inspector general pointed out last week. In a scathing report, he said that the organizations the department pays to help borrowers with repayment were out of compliance on 61 percent of the 343 interactions it monitored from 2015 to 2017. Mr. Shafer’s servicer, FedLoan (which is part of Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency) was among the worst.

When Mr. Shafer went to Lowe’s, he was doing exactly what federal policymakers might hope. After more than a decade repaying his debts, he was taking that newly available cash and funneling it into the American economy. Or at least he was trying to.

Those store cards are usually pretty easy to get, so Mr. Shafer’s denial was disconcerting. After a bit of investigation, he found that his credit scores had fallen 125 to 150 points, depending on which bureau he asked.

I scoured his credit reports and found that FedLoan had marked him months past due on his loan, even though he had made on-time monthly payments through his bank’s autopay service until the day his loan statement stated that he had zero dollars due. The FedLoan delinquency notices were the only thing in the credit reports that could explain the decline in his scores and the rejection at Lowe’s.

Mr. Shafer called FedLoan’s customer service line to try to get an explanation. The inspector general report listed FedLoan’s parent organization as the worst performer among nine servicers in a survey of customer-service calls in April and May of 2017, so perhaps he should not have expected much in the way of assistance.

Sure enough, after minutes of what sounded like head-scratching, the representative Mr. Shafer spoke with said that the situation made no sense to him, either. His solution was to tell Mr. Shafer to send his credit reports to a FedLoan post office box in Harrisburg, Pa., for follow-up. And no, he said, there was no one Mr. Shafer could talk to about it on the phone.

In its response to the inspector general’s report, P.H.E.A.A. said in a statement last week that since 2017, it had spent millions of dollars to improve its service. “This includes the ability to quickly match uniquely complex calls with the right customer service agent who has the specialized experience needed to provide white-glove level of assistance regardless of the complicating circumstance.”

But asking someone whose credit you’ve trashed to send the matter away to a post office box for consideration is not white-glove service. It’s not even boxing-glove service. It’s an open hand across the face.

Mr. Shafer didn’t want to wait around for FedLoan’s envelope-rippers, so I took the matter to Keith New, P.H.E.A.A.’s spokesman. At first, he said that the organization could not find any “negative reporting action” on Mr. Shafer’s account.

Two days later, he emailed me the following: “We identified a timing issue involving an automated adjustment process for the credit reporting on the loan for November, 2018. We submitted a credit reporting adjustment immediately and have since confirmed with all of the consumer reporting agencies that there are no delinquencies reporting on his account. A letter is being sent/emailed to Jed today reaffirming the action taken to ensure that his account reflects no delinquencies.”

That same day, Mr. Shafer got a note from Stephanie Galloway, a FedLoan vice president. “We wish to express our sincerest apologies and regret any inconvenience this may have caused you,” it said.

Just to be certain, we checked his credit again a few hours after I heard from Mr. New, with Mr. Shafer and his wife paying the fee themselves to do so. Indeed, the problem was fixed and his FICO credit scores — which are what most lenders look at when checking up on individuals — were very good once more.

Mr. Shafer, who often hears from other struggling public servants who manage to track down his email address, is glad he did not have to resort to the mail. “There is a level of anxiety that I know people feel when they have to start sending stuff,” he said. “That post office box in Harrisburg has to be one of the most feared and dreaded P.O. boxes in the history of humankind.”

So how exactly did this error happen, and will it happen to others? The origin is not clear, but Mr. New said it would not happen again. “We've confirmed that this was indeed an isolated instance and have addressed the root cause within the process so no other borrower should experience any negative issues,” he said in an email.

Seth Frotman, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center and the former student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said he was not that surprised, given P.H.E.A.A.’s history of problems with credit reporting. He reminded me that P.H.E.A.A. had once asked the Supreme Court to spare it from having to abide by the rules that lenders in the banking industry must follow.

“These companies are huge furnishers of credit reporting info, which means that the financial future and credit history and the cost of credit for millions of borrowers are tied up in these companies getting it right,” he said. “This is just one example of the numerous ways in which they are failing at this miserably.”

If you too have run the public service loan forgiveness gauntlet and think you have succeeded, check your credit reports before you throw a party and use your loan correspondence as confetti. If there’s a problem, email me so I can help you get it fixed. That way, your wrecked credit won’t delay a car or home purchase any longer than necessary, and you can avoid waiting around for weeks while someone at a FedLoan post office box deals with your situation.

But before we go, let us lament, once again, the fact that this sort of warning and intervention is necessary at all. Public service loan forgiveness was a program with bipartisan backing. Surely, we can all agree that our teachers and nurses and firefighters should not have to put up with so much to get what they earned.

Ron Lieber is the Your Money columnist and the author of the forthcoming “What to Pay For College.” He is an unpaid adviser to the Money section of Wirecutter and previously wrote for The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and Fortune. @ronlieber • Facebook

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