The Department of Education said yesterday that it plans to implement Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) System functionality to support 2009-2010 Pell Grant changes related to the HEOA on June 26-27, 2009. The Dept. will communicate details about the implementation, as well as all necessary operational guidance, in mid-June 2009.

In the meantime, schools can refer to Volume I, Section 2 (Overview of Changes from 2008-2009 to 2009-2010) and Volume II, Section 1 (Implementation Guide, pages 159-160) of the 2009-2010 COD Technical Reference for operational information, including how the COD System will accommodate multiple Pell Grant awards within a single award year.

EDExpress for Windows 2009-2010, Release 4.0, due to be released in early July 2009, will contain the new field "Additional Eligibility Indicator" (AEI). If checked, this field will allow users to originate Pell Grant awards up to 200% of the scheduled award for an Award Year. The AEI will also relax edits so that the Total Payment Ceiling can be greater than a scheduled award. For schools that use EDExpress to convert to XML for transmission to and from the COD System, Release 4.0 will use the correct schema to allow "pass through" processing. We will provide additional information as we near the software release date and will update software documentation to explain the new functionality.

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