By Karen McCarthy, NASFAA Policy & Federal Relations Staff 

The Department of Education (ED) posted a draft of the 2016-17 Paper Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and other related documents (e.g., Paper Student Aid Report) on August 12. The documents may be found under "Forms and Instructions."

Other than rolling over date references, ED indicated that the only substantive changes in the 2016-17 draft are the following:

• Amended the informational text for Step 6 to read:  “Enter the six-digit federal school code and your housing plans for each college or school you wish to receive your FAFSA information. You can find the school codes at www.fafsa.gov or by calling 1-800-433-3243. If you cannot obtain a code, write in the complete name, address, city and state of the college.  All of the information you included on your FAFSA, with the exception of the list of colleges, will be sent to each of the colleges you listed.  In addition, all of your FAFSA information, including the list of colleges, will be sent to your state student grant agency.  For federal student aid purposes, it does not matter in what order you list your selected schools. For state aid, you may want to list your preferred college first. To find out how to have more colleges receive your FAFSA information, read What is the FAFSA? on page 2.”

The Institutional Student Information Record (ISIR) will not include the names of other schools to which an applicant’s FAFSA information has been sent. ED is proposing this change in response to concerns about use of the school listing on the ISIR for packaging purposes.

• On the paper FAFSA, rearranged the notes pages as follows:
• Moved page 2 to 9
• Moved page 9 to 10
• Moved page 10 to 2  

This rearranged order of the notes pages places the “What is the FAFSA?” and corresponding frequently asked questions at the beginning of the paper FAFSA, rather than the end. As a result of moving the notes pages, all references to these pages were updated to reflect the new page numbers.

• Updated IRS Form 1040 and 1040A Tax Line References in questions 37 and 86 text to “Enter […] income tax for 2015. Income tax amount is on IRS Form 1040—line 56 minus line 46; 1040A—line 28 minus line 36; or 1040EZ—line 10.”

This adjustment subtracts the “excess advance premium advance tax repayment” (APTC) from taxes paid. APTC is a payment made under the Affordable Care Act for coverage during the year to an insurance provider that pays for part or all of the premiums.  

Although the 2016-17 FAFSA on the Web (FOTW) demo site is not yet available and the number of paper filers is small, we encourage you to review the draft paper FAFSA and submit your comments and suggestions on both the draft paper FAFSA and FOTW. Your comments are important because question wording for FOTW is often duplicated from the paper FAFSA and because comments on FOTW can be taken into consideration as ED develops the FOTW demo site this fall.

Submit comments electronically through the Federal eRulemaking Portal by selecting Docket ID number ED-2015-ICCD-0101 or via postal mail, commercial delivery, or hand delivery. In addition, please submit a copy of your comments to NASFAA at [email protected] so that we can represent the interests and concerns of our member institutions.

Comments are due by October 13, 2015.

Publication Date: 8/14/2015

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