And sometimes the changes you make can have great meaning...
I just finished dinner with the kids, and am getting ready to watch the last regular episode of Survivor, but before I do, I thought I needed to post a little more on the subject of corrections.
This is me on my soapbox, so if you don't want the preaching, move on... (fair warning)
While we send FAFSA corrections at MIT on all of our financial aid applicants, the Federal government does not require this of us. In fact, most colleges in the country do not send corrections on all of their applicants; most only send corrections for the students whose Pell awards are changing, for whom they are changing the number in family or in college, or for whom they are making a dependency status change. This is all that the Federal government mandates you do as a college processing Federal financial aid. Simply send these changes.
But at MIT we send them all. Why? Well to answer that I need to speak a little to what happens with the data you submit. While the data you file is maintained under strict confidentiality, the government does use aggregate data to make some assumptions about all people filing for financial aid. For instance, the government may use some of the information to estimate average family incomes, average number in family, average ages of parents, and average family contributions of those applying. Well, this worries me. If the data is bad, and I know it is bad since I have verified the information with a copy of a tax return or other information, why wouldn't I want to correct it? I update the information in the CPS (Central Processing System), because to do otherwise would be, in my view, to be knowingly allowing bad data to persist. And if there is something I can't stand, it's bad data.
While we may be out on this bandwagon on our own at MIT, guess what? We won't be for long, more than likely. Why? Well, guess what' s coming down the proverbial pipe for those of us in the financial aid profession, and for you as a financial aid applicant... An IRS match.
Soon, although how soon is anyone's guess at this point, the Department of Education and the IRS will begin to run a match between data provided by you on your financial aid application and data provided by you on your tax return. This match, referred to as the “IRS Match”, will provide a more centralized way to confirm the accuracy of your application data. Sounds OK, no? Well, no. There are a lot of concerns about this, beginning with a problem of timing. IRS Data is generally not available until July or August, financial aid awards need to be complete much earlier that that. Since we do right now (and probably still will be) collect tax returns from applicants much earlier than July or August, we already know what the match will reveal. It only makes sense for us to send our corrections so that our applicants won't fail the match. In fact, this year the FAFSA has taken baby steps toward this process (asking for mother and father's SSNs, sending emails to families who applied saying that their tax status was “estimated“ asking them to correct their information, etc.). There are many other unanswered questions about how the IRS Match would work including concerns around privacy, information sharing, resolution, etc. If you are interested, the presentation made by the Department of Education representative at last summer's financial aid conference can be found here.
So, MIT may indeed just be ahead of the curve. Hmm, us?
Be well, and keep commenting. I would love to see your thoughts on this issue as well.