By MorraLee Keller, Senior Director, Strategic Programming
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Earlier this week, the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) confirmed additional errors regarding the data being used to calculate Student Aid Indexes (SAI). Aid administrators from around the country and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators reported these potential errors immediately after
Institutional Student Information Records (ISIRs) began to arrive at the colleges and universities in March. The US Department of Education (ED) and the IRS worked together to identify three primary issues that were impacting the SAIs being calculated.
Both agencies will continue to issue guidance to higher education institutions moving forward.
FSA believes that about 80% of the FAFSAs processed by the end of March can be used to make financial aid offers to students. They will provide the institutions with a file of unique identifier codes that will let them know which ISIRs
they can proceed with for aid offers.
There has been no date announced for the reprocessing of the remaining 20%. This will likely continue to delay award offers to this subset of students. As of the time of this publication, it is the National College Attainment Network’s (NCAN) understanding
that FSA does not intend to send any special communication to those students whose FAFSAs will need to be reprocessed.
On April 3, FSA decided to reprocess all FAFSAs affected with the issues listed below at the demand of financial aid administrators. Once the reprocessed ISIR arrives at an institution, the institution will have the choice whether to use the original or reprocessed form.
The first two issues confirmed affect those who successfully had their information transferred through the Direct Data Exchange (DDX). Education tax credits that were transferred prior to March 30 were incorrect, but the IRS has since corrected this so
that the actual reported number is being reflected on the FAFSA. This error impacts about 15% of the FAFSAs filed before that date.
The second issue is related to those who filed amended tax returns for 2022. The DDX exchange was transferring the updated adjusted gross income and tax filing status while simultaneously transferring the amounts for all other required fields from the
original tax return. FSA is working on a solution to this issue. However, the fix will result in only information from the original tax return being transferred to system, and institutions will not be notified that an amended form has been filed. FSA estimates this issue affects about 2% of FAFSAs filed.
The third and final issue confirmed is related to those who are manually entering the tax paid and education tax credit data. The instructions on the paper and online forms are inconsistent with the fields the DDX is transferring to the form. FSA will
amend the instructions to match what data is being transferred through the DDX. Institutions are being instructed that they
do not have to consider these different numbers as conflicting information and do not need to resolve the differences.
FSA has previously announced that it discovered that student assets reported were not brought into the SAI formula for about 200,000 dependent students. The recent announcement indicates that only the FAFSAs that would lower the student’s SAI will be
reprocessed.
Now that the backlog of submitted FAFSAs is cleared, we hope these resolutions can occur quickly and that the opportunity to make corrections to FAFSAs will happen in the first half of April.
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