Since 1995, Maximus (MMS) has grown from $50 million in annual revenues to more than $4 billion in 2021.
Maximus (MMS) Share Price 1995-2022
(Source: Seeking Alpha)
With an army of more than 35,000 workers, Maximus' clients include 28 US agencies: the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Bureau of the Census, Patent and Trademark Office, Federal Student Aid, Department of Defense and US Army, Department of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Medicare and Medicaid, Department of Labor, Office of Personnel Management, Securities and Exchange Commission and many more.
As a contractor to Federal Student Aid (FSA), Maximus has more than 13 million student loans to service. Its four contracts with the US Department of Education total almost $1 Billion.
While CEO Bruce Caswell made more than $6 million in total compensation last year, Maximus' customer service representatives, the people who have to make the calls to the growing number of student loan defaulters, make less money than workers at Walmart.
Maximus has recently posted federally contracted jobs on Indeed for $13.15 an hour in Texas and South Carolina, even though the federal minimum wage has been raised to $15 an hour. Wages for Maximus workers in other states are reportedly even lower, as little as $10 an hour in Kentucky and other states with regressive economies.
Maximus' largest institutional investors include BlackRock, Vanguard Group, and State Street Corp--three financial behemoths. BlackRock has $10 trillion in Assets Under Management (AUM), Vanguard Group has about $7 Trillion in Assets Under Management, and State Street has almost $4 Trillion in AUM.
Bank of New York Mellon, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America each own 900,000 shares or more.
Public retirement funds, including public school teachers retirement funds (see table below), are directly and indirectly invested in the Poverty Industrial Complex and the student loan mess through Maximus and other large corporations.
Maximus and its executives have spent more than $10 million on federal lobbying and political contributions since 1998. By 2020, Maximus had 14 lobbyists in DC and had contributed to the campaigns of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump.
Maximus' strategic partners include AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Cisco.
Social justice advocates have to wonder, how can the student loan system be fixed if the US establishment has a vested interested in the mess?
Maximus (MMS) Top Institutional Investors
List of Public Funds Directly Invested in Maximus
Alaska Department of Revenue
California PERS
California State Teachers Retirement System
Colorado PERS
Florida Retirement System
Pennsylvania Public School Retirement System
Teachers Retirement System of Kentucky
Louisiana State Employees Retirement System
Ohio PERS
New Mexico Educational Retirement Board
New York State Retirement System
New York State Teachers Retirement System
Ontario Teachers Retirement System
Oregon PERS
State of Tennessee Treasury
Teachers Retirement System of Texas
State of Wisconsin Investment Board
Related link: How One Company Is Making Millions Off Trump’s War on the Poor (Tracie McMillan, Mother Jones)
Related link: Maximus Institutional Investors
Related link: Maximus Takes Over Federal Contract for Navient
Related link: Maximus Will Have to Answer to Student Loan Borrowers Harmed by Company Practices (Student Borrowers Protection Center)
Maximus was completely unprepared for Black Swan event shocks like Coronavirus -- security concerns about handling highly sensitive personal identifying information such as Social Security numbers and birthdays make it impossible to pivot to remote work with home-based remote workers.
ReplyDeleteMaximus' inability to manage this shift smoothly also implicates future Student Loan servicing. One factor weighing heavily against Maximus are "The Great Resignation" employment trends, lackluster wage differentials, and workplace social distancing. Worker management presents special challenges in the remote working environment. What can Maximus do to recruit, train, and retain call center operatives? That question will decide the future of Maximus' success or failure.
Borrowers are a lot more resilient than the media gives them credit. They can overcome bad servicers, bad economies, and even coronavirus. Millions of direct loan borrowers in forbearance are repaying their loans. Loan "status" has become even more delinked from payments than it was prior to the pandemic.
ReplyDeleteYou're hilarious. Anonymously Hilarious. Even before the pandemic, 58.9% of all borrowers were not making payments on their federal loans. This will climb, easily, past 75% if/when they turn the loans back on. The lending system is finished. You should find a new government tit to suck from.
Deletebit.ly/mostnotpaying
DeleteAnonymous, dream on. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2022/02/college-meltdown-20.html
ReplyDelete