FAFSA Processing Bug Overriding ISIR High School Codes
By Jill Desjean, NASFAA Policy & Federal Relations Staff
Federal Student Aid (FSA) has recently identified a FAFSA processing bug that is causing some ISIRs with student-submitted corrections to have the student’s High School Code replaced with all 0s or all 9s, which then causes the High School Flag to appear on the subsequent ISIR transaction. FSA is currently testing changes to fix this issue, and plans to implement the changes in an upcoming release scheduled for April 24, 2019.
FSA has no plans at this time to reprocess affected ISIRs. NASFAA has confirmed with FSA that, if the institution has a previous ISIR transaction with a valid High School Code and no High School Flag, the financial aid office need not perform any further follow-up to confirm that the student’s High School Code is valid.
In the event this issue were to surface as an audit issue in the future, FSA will be able to document that the issue was caused by a processing issue on their end. FSA is currently assessing the need for an Electronic Announcement to address this issue. In the interim, NASFAA recommends that institutions document the issue in affected students’ files for audit purposes.
Publication Date: 3/25/2019
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