Default Stories due to SMART abuse and/or other 'cause'

General Discussion for SMART Scholarship Recipients
Sisyphus
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Joined: Tue Feb 13, 2018 12:40 pm
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Default Stories due to SMART abuse and/or other 'cause'

Post by Sisyphus »

Hello everyone,

As several weeks have gone by and more of the slow roll of debt letters will have gone out from DFAS I have been working on a detailed report about the design and operations of the SMART program, including various participant stories highlighting the…significant issues with and in some cases outright unethical decisions by the SMART program.

I’m writing this post in the hopes that more participants in default where the SMART program can be argued to be at least partly to blame, due to their policies and/or decisions, have found this forum and have stories to share about their negative experiences with the program. These would be included in the brief going out this week (or in later, updated versions if you stumble across this post later).


To that end I’m looking for one of two variations of your story (or ideally, both):

Brief Summary: a short, couple paragraph description of your experience with the SMART program and all the ways its design, policies and/or management decisions worked against you staying in the program. This description should be as ANONYMOUS as possible; don’t include any details that would make you personally identifiable to any significant degree or that you wouldn’t want a random congressional staffer, other participant or other such person to see.

Full Story: An in depth rendition of the same story, going into as much detail as you can/want with any additional documentation you have to substantiate your claims that you want to include. You don’t have to name yourself but the more in depth details the better. This long form version will ONLY be disseminated to investigative government agencies, congressional offices that choose to look into this matter and other equivalent entities (for anything else, I’ll get in contact again for approval to disseminate).


For maximum discretion insofar as possible without making things logistically impossible, I’ll be serving as the sole repository of these full stories and keeping the master copy of the public version updated with any new brief summaries. The easiest way to get in touch with me is to either:

- Join the defaulters’ Discord I set up (which you should probably do for information purposes anyway) via https://discord.gg/MEhgRRC and PM me on there (I’m the only admin there, alias is the same as on here) and we can go from there.

- PM me on here with your interest and/or stories if you have an account here, although it will just move from here to email/the discord so the former is more direct.


To reiterate, the “brief summaries” would be available in the public copies of the report for other participants in default to send to their representatives to get their initial attention and for other means of action. Means for the office to contact me if they wish to inquire further will be included at the end of the brief so that your detailed, personal stories get as minimal of circulation as is practically feasible by restricting it to those actively working on our behalf.

If you are reading this and you’ve wound up in default due in any part to the design and operations of the SMART program and not simply your own professional/life choices, I implore you to NOT take this process lying down and not just try to go it alone. I can GUARANTEE you other participants were wronged more than you can think by this program, and the more stories we can present attesting to this the stronger a defense we can mount against the financial ruin SMART is trying to bring about for many us.

Guest

Re: Default Stories due to SMART abuse and/or other 'cause'

Post by Guest »

It might be useful for your case to find out the percentage of participants who have ever quit during Phase 1 or 2 compared to the total number of participants. If the percentage is like 20%, I bet there is a story there. If it's more like 1 or 2%...I'm guessing no amount of banding together is going to do anything. Seems like you want to start with global statistics and then work down to stories, rather than the opposite.

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