"Starting this week, students may encounter a new identity-verification step while filing out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid as the Trump administration continues to prioritize cracking down on fraud," Inside Higher Ed reports.

..."The department predicts that “the vast majority of rejected applications” will be fraudulent, so “there will only be a small number of applications that would need to undergo additional screening by an institution via in-person verification.”

But on a recent edition of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators’ podcast, Off the Cuff, NASFAA president Melanie Storey said she would be remiss if she “didn’t push a little bit.” She asked the department to quantify the volume of in-person verification that will remain. To which Aaron Lemon-Strauss, executive director of the FAFSA program, responded, 'I’m not going to be able to give you a number yet.'

That said, Lemon-Strauss noted that 'If you’ve got a couple hundred people in a gym at a FAFSA completion event, most likely, none of them will experience [being flagged and required to complete an on-the-spot identity check] because they will just go through the FAFSA process as before, except with the added confidence that we’ve screened them and verified their identity.'

Storey and others also say that while college financial aid offices will not be required to take further steps related to any rejected ISIRs they receive, there will be no way to distinguish which rejected ISIRs are real fraudsters and which are eligible students who were wrongly flagged and unable to complete the identity-verification process to override the rejection on the spot.

NASFAA's "Notable Headlines" section highlights media coverage of financial aid to help members stay up to date with the latest news. Articles included under the notable headlines section are not written by NASFAA, but rather by external sources. Inclusion in Today's News does not imply endorsement of the material or guarantee the accuracy of information presented.

Publication Date: 4/27/2026