Updates on Timelines for Corrections and Reprocessing and What it Means for Partners (2024)

This electronic announcement provides a technical update on the Department of Education’s (the Department’s) plans to:

We appreciate the extraordinary efforts being made by schools, vendors, states, and other partners during this difficult year. The information and resources described in this announcement are intended to help schools assess the Institutional Student Information Records (ISIRs) they have received and package financial aid offers for students as quickly as possible.

The Department has now transmitted the ISIRs from approximately 7 million FAFSA forms to schools, states, and designated scholarship organizations. Applicants’ ISIRs are now being sent within 1 to 3 days of submission.

We have carefully considered the questions and issues raised by our partners through our call centers and email, listening sessions, direct engagement, and other means of outreach. The Technical FAQ and Known Issues documentation contains the status of many of those issues. Going forward, we will continue to quickly identify, communicate about, and resolve any issues that arise.

Based on partner feedback and our own testing, we now believe we have identified the errors affecting the accurate processing of large numbers of FAFSA forms and have fixed those errors within the FAFSA processing system (FPS) and the IRS FUTURE Act Direct Data Exchange (FA-DDX). The Department is sending ISIRs that provide a reliable basis for schools and states to package student aid.

We have completed the development of the necessary code, and this week, we are entering the final phases of testing, which may include the corrections functionality being available for brief periods of time (i.e., several hours at a time) over the coming days to those who have submitted FAFSA forms.

Timeline for student corrections: Our goal is to make student corrections broadly available early next week. Once they are able to do so, students who need to make corrections or who choose to make additions or changes to their FAFSA forms should return to StudentAid.gov to complete those updates. We will communicate publicly that students needing to make corrections, such as adding schools, providing a signature, and allowing for IRS data to be shared can do so by logging into their account. For most applicants and contributors, this process should only take a few minutes. Schools and states should typically receive a new ISIR transaction, and students should typically be able to review their updated FAFSA Submission Summary, within 1 to 3 days of the applicant’s submission of a correction.

Proportion of records: To date, as many as 16% of FAFSA applications require a student correction. In addition, some students may wish to send their records to additional schools or make other student-initiated corrections.

The overwhelming majority (95%) of the required student corrections involve six issues, which we have prioritized in our testing. Four of these are that the form is missing a student’s signature, a parent’s signature, consent and approval from the student to retrieve federal tax information (FTI) as required by the FAFSA Simplification Act, or consent and approval from the parent to retrieve FTI. Two additional issues include dependent students choosing to only be considered for eligibility for Direct Unsubsidized Loans or making selections on the form that place them in a provisionally independent status at historically high rates. We will continue to provide updates to address corrections-related issues as they arise.

Approximately 30% of FAFSA forms are potentially affected by known processing or data errors. (This could include overlap with some FAFSA forms that require student corrections, as previously described.) These errors have arisen in both the calculations performed by the FPS and the data provided by the FA-DDX.

Schools and state agencies will receive a subsequent ISIR transaction for each reprocessed record. In order to move forward expeditiously, schools and states can exercise their judgment to use the original ISIR—not the reprocessed record—as the basis to make financial aid offers and awards. However, if the reprocessed ISIR results in greater financial aid eligibility for students, schools and states will be required to revise their financial aid offer based upon the reprocessed ISIRs.

In the coming days, the Department will provide data to assist schools in identifying the records for which the reprocessing will increase students’ aid eligibility, as described in more detail below. In addition, in a separate Electronic Announcement, we will provide additional information about how schools and states can treat ISIRs affected by errors when making financial aid offers and disbursing funds during the 2024-25 award year.

Proportion of records: About one-third of potentially affected records—approximately 10% of all forms—require reprocessing through the FPS. (A subset of these forms may also require corrected tax information, as described below.) The largest group of these forms includes an incorrectly calculated Student Aid Index for records of dependent students with assets, as outlined in a March 22 Electronic Announcement (GENERAL-24-24). Other issues that require reprocessing, as outlined in the Technical FAQ and Known Issues documentation, are also included in this group.

Timeline for reprocessing: We expect to reprocess these records during the week of April 15. As noted above, schools and states can exercise their judgment to use the ISIRs they have now as the basis to make financial aid offers. The Department expects the vast majority of these reprocessed ISIRs to reduce student aid eligibility.

Proportion of records: The remaining two-thirds of potentially affected records—approximately 20% of all FAFSA forms—require corrected tax information from the IRS as outlined in an April 1 Electronic Announcement (GENERAL-24-29). These inconsistences are related to (1) education tax credits and (2) data for the adjusted gross income (AGI) and filing status from amended or updated returns.

Timeline for reprocessing: We are working to reprocess FAFSA forms affected by tax data issues. We are currently targeting to reprocess these records and begin sending them to schools by May 1 and will keep you updated on our progress. Reprocessing these records will require building the capability to update tax information during reprocessing, rather than simply retrieving it once, which includes significant programming and testing within our processing system. The Department expects most, but not all, of these reprocessed ISIRs to reduce student aid eligibility. As noted above, schools and states can exercise their judgment to use the ISIRs they have now if the reprocessed ISIR does not result in greater financial aid eligibility for students.

On April 5—as outlined in an April 3 Electronic Announcement (GENERAL-24-31)—the Department sent two lists of student records to institutions and states. The first contained a list of FAFSA Universally Unique Identification Numbers (UUIDs) from records that are unaffected by known errors, and the second contained a FAFSA UUID list of those that are affected by known errors and that the Department intends to reprocess. The lists can be used to identify the approximately 30% of records potentially affected by errors that the Department intends to reprocess.

Later this week, we will be securely sending additional data to SAIG mailboxes to assist schools and states with analyzing affected records to further identify additional records for which they can package aid. The data will be school- or state-specific and will include:

Each record will also include an identification of the known issue that triggered reprocessing and whether the record will require reprocessing through the FPS system, the FA-DDX system, or both. Most will also include an indication of whether the SAI on the reprocessed ISIR will be higher or lower than the original ISIR.

The following is a summary table describing the different categories of ISIRs and how schools and states can move forward with processing records.