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The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing next Wednesday to examine the data breach that occurred through the IRS Data Retrieval Tool, which was subsequently shut down. The hearing, titled "Reviewing the FAFSA Data Breach,” will be held at 9:30 am ET on Wednesday, May 3, and at least one Department of Education official is expected to testify, according to POLITICO. The list of witness names has not yet been released. Stay tuned to Today's News for coverage of the hearing.

Recent supervisory work conducted by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that some student loan servicers failed to provide borrowers with legal protections by not refunding charges the borrowers were due. According to the report, some student loan servicers acted on incorrect information regarding students’ enrollment status provided by the National Student Clearinghouse, resulting in some students being wrongly charged for loan deferment. The servicers then failed to refund those charges even after being made aware of the data errors. The charges included improper late fees and capitalization of unpaid interest.

In a letter sent on Wednesday, NASFAA expressed its gratitude to the Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos for the verification relief it has provided students in response to the outage of the IRS Data Retrieval Tool (DRT). The guidance, which allows institutions to use a signed copy of 2015 tax returns for verification documentation and to no longer require documentation from the IRS to verify non-filing status, "will go a long way in helping to ease the burden of verification," NASFAA President Justin Draeger wrote. "…we remain hopeful that the DRT will be available to students as soon as possible," the letter said.

Between fiscal year 2010 and 2015, ED imposed fines averaging over $91,000 for Clery Act violations alone. NASFAA’s Consumer Information Assessment can help you avoid such fines by providing a confidential, comprehensive peer review of all required disclosure and reporting requirements, including the Clery Act. Request information about this review today.

Learn the answer to this question and learn how to instantly find credible and reliable solutions to your most pressing regulatory and compliance questions with NASFAA's AskRegs Knowledgebase. The Knowledgebase guide and video tutorials highlight the many features of this tool.

This Electronic Announcement informs the community that the Department will not be making changes and ISIRs sent to state grant agencies will continue to present the colleges in the order they were listed by the student on the FAFSA. Note that the Department continues to not include the listing of colleges on ISIRs provided to postsecondary institutions.

"Many times — maybe too many — high school seniors are just so happy to be accepted to their dream school that they don't give a second thought to the financial implications of their college choice. Then reality sinks in when they start digging into the details of college award letters," The Detroit Free-Press reports. "One mistake that some families make is focusing on the total dollar amount listed for the aid package on an award letter, said Karen McCarthy, director of policy analysis for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators."

"More than 130 Democratic lawmakers called on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Wednesday to reinstate consumer protections for student borrowers in federal contracts with loan servicers," Inside Higher Ed reports.

"Fannie Mae, the largest backer of mortgage credit in the country, has issued new guidelines allowing home owners to refinance their mortgages to pay off their student loan debt. The option to essentially swap student loan debt for mortgage debt is an expansion of a program launched last year with personal finance company SoFi," Inside Higher Ed reports.

"The Trump administration appears to have drastically slowed the Education Department's approval of debt relief to tens of thousands of student borrowers seeking to have their federal loans canceled on the grounds their colleges defrauded them, according to several current and former government officials," POLITICO PRO reports.

"With their students facing rising debt and pressure to land a job after graduation, colleges and universities are focusing less on the meaning of life and more on how to earn a living," The Wall Street Journal reports.

"If you go by the odds, Sierra Williams shouldn't be in college, let alone at a highly selective school like the University of Southern California," Frank Bruni writes for The New York Times. "Many kids in her low-income neighborhood here don't get to or through the 12th grade. Her single mother isn't college-educated. Neither are Sierra's two brothers, one of whom is in prison. Her sister has only a two-year associate degree."

"For me, the Pell Grant was more than just money," Mandy Zatynski writes for The Education Trust. "It was a savior –– covering a portion of my college expenses that if left unmet may have made it impossible for me to go to college."

"Hope springs eternal for the fate of the year-round Pell Grant," according to New America. "The year-round Pell Grant, which allows students to continue accessing their Pell funding even after the semester has ended, rather than having to pause until the start of the next academic year, was first implemented in the 2009-10 school year. But its implementation coincided with a large shortfall in the Pell Grant program and it was eliminated as a cost-saver shortly thereafter, in 2011."

"The Trump administration has sent mixed signals about the future of the DACA program, creating uncertainty among recipients and their families," according to The New England Journal of Higher Education.

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