By Catherine Brown, Senior Director, Policy and Advocacy
Reading time: Two minutes
On Tuesday, April 9, the US Department of Education (ED) released an electronic announcement about the technical issues surrounding Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) submissions and processing. The highlights of this announcement for National College Attainment Network (NCAN) members include:
Students will be able to make corrections to their FAFSAs starting next week (April 15-19). ED previously announced that corrections would be available by mid-April and this announcement comes right on time. According to ED, 16% of FAFSAs contain errors and the most common errors – impacting 95% of the 16% of FAFSAs with errors
– are the FAFSA lacks a student or parent signature, lacks consent to retrieve income data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and/or students have accidentally indicated that they only want to be considered for unsubsidized student loans.
Most of these corrections should only take a few minutes to fix and schools will receive updated ISIRs within a few days. Dependent students who need to change their answer to include aid beyond unsubsidized loans will need to invite a contributor
or contributors to complete their section. To make corrections, applicants should log into their student.gov account.
The Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) will reprocess forms with errors within the month. The announcement says that 30% of all FAFSAs have data errors and laid out a timeline for reprocessing those forms. They fall into two categories:
Data errors: 10% of all FAFSAs have data errors, the most common of which is an incorrectly calculated Student Aid Index for records of dependent students with assets. FSA will reprocess these forms the week of April 15.
Incorrect tax information: 20% of all FAFSAs require corrected tax information from the IRS. These inconsistences are related to (1) education tax credits and (2) data for the adjusted gross income and filing status from amended or updated returns. FSA intends to reprocess these forms and begin sending the revised ISIRs to schools by May 1.
The announcement also says that FSA will be sending school or state-specific lists this week with known processing errors identified for each student. ED encourages schools to package financial aid offers based on the ISIRs it has received: “For the purposes
of packaging and disbursing aid expeditiously, schools and states may, based on data provided by the Department, use their judgment and rely on the original ISIR—not the reprocessed record—if the original ISIR results in greater financial aid eligibility
for students.” If the reprocessed ISIR results in greater financial aid, schools may make estimated offers now but must use the more accurate, reprocessed record for final offers and disbursement of funds.
NCAN encourages its members to read the announcement directly
and to reach out to us with any questions.
Email to a Friend