ED Reprocesses FAFSA Transactions Due to Fraud Evaluation Issue
By Maria Carrasco, NASFAA Staff Reporter
The Department of Education (ED) announced last week that it corrected a technical issue that prevented its new fraud prevention evaluation results from being included in certain FAFSA transactions.
Specifically, ED states that from June 29 to July 6, a technical issue prevented fraud evaluation results for some FAFSAs, with ED correcting the issue on July 6. As a result of this issue, ED has conducted a one-time fraud evaluation on FAFSAs received during the June 29 to July 6 period, and has reprocessed those transactions under reprocessing reason code 18. ED stated it has completed the reprocessing of impacted FAFSAs on Monday, August 24.
Per FSA’s estimate, approximately 7,000 applications with indicators associated with suspected fraud will be flagged with reject 74 or 75 during this reprocessing, as applicants were not given the opportunity to complete the real-time identity verification before submission.
Earlier this year, ED launched new identity fraud prevention measures where each FAFSA is screened for fraud risk before it is submitted. This effort is part of the Trump administration’s wider effort to crackdown on fraud in the student aid programs.
Publication Date: 8/25/2026
You must be logged in to comment on this page.