| PublicationDate: 4/12/96 Summary: 1996-97 FAFSA Processing - Announcement #31 Author: ODAS - Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary - SFA Announcement #31, April 12, 1996 1996-97 FAFSA Processing Dear Colleague, This letter is announcement number 31 in our continuing updates on 1996-97 processing. Since I wrote you two weeks ago, we have made tremendous strides in processing applications. As of April 11, we processed 3,177,834 original and renewal paper applications, resulting in over 7.2 million Institutional Student Information Records (ISIRs). We have completed 100 percent of January applications, nearly 100 percent of February applications, 76 percent of March applications, and 7 percent of April applications. We have also processed 86,783 electronic applications. We expect that we will meet our goal of returning to normal processing cycle next week as planned. One minor technical problem emerged within the past twenty-four hours. Yesterday we experienced problems in conducting the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) data base match. As a result there was no compute Thursday. We expect the fourth compute for this week to be done today(Friday). The five computes next week will contain any applications we were unable to compute this week because of this difficulty. Processing of history corrections began March 15. To date we have received 381,283 corrections and processed 121,101, or 32%. We are already gearing up for a peak in the submission of corrections over the next month. In recent years approximately 40 percent of applicants submit follow-up corrections. Based on application receipts of almost 4 million to date, we are preparing to process 1.6 million corrections by converting most of our supplemental processing capacity to corrections. We will be able to process original and renewal paper applications within normal processing time while keeping up with corrections because of the additional processing sites we have added over the past eight weeks. Next week we will revise our daily reporting of applications. Since we will be able to process original and renewal applications within normal processing time, we will track these applications as a cumulative number -- that is, total number of applications received and total and percent of applications processed. We will begin tracking corrections by date of receipt as we have done with the paper applications. We will also continue to work with you on any issues of concern. Please make sure that you report possible problems directly to our Customer Support team for the most responsive reply from us. Our team is available 9-5:30 EST Monday through Friday at (800) 433-7327. While we are proud of our accomplishments to date, we are very aware that these 1996-97 processing delays have caused considerable distress for our customers. Please be assured that until every submitted application and correction is processed we will not consider our job done. We are very grateful to you for your patience and support and especially for your willingness to develop school-based strategies to ensure that no student is unduly harmed by these processing delays. Please let us know if there are other ways in which we can assist you in the weeks to come. Respectfully submitted, Betsy Hicks |