| PublicationDate: 3/13/96 Summary: 1996-97 FAFSA Processing - Announcement #9 Author: ODAS - Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary - SFA Announcement #9 -- March 13, 1996 1996-97 FAFSA Processing Status Report In keeping with our commitment to keep you informed about the status of application processing for the 1996-97 award year, we are providing this daily announcement. This announcement is number nine in the series. A. To date, approximately 750,000 applications have been processed by the Central Processing System (CPS) and over 2,000,000 Insitutional Student Information Records (ISIRs) have been sent. B. Reject 16 and FAFSA Express Following is additional information about CPS reject 16. As indicated in announcement 7, FAFSA Express filers who do not have a signature page processed within 21 days after transmitting a FAFSA Express application to the CPS will receive a reject 16 on their Student Aid Report (SAR) or Institutional Student Information Record (ISIR). In addition, FAFSA Express filers who indicate that they cannot or will not be printing a signature page will have a flag sent to the Central Processing System (CPS) with their application indicating this. Such records will not be held for processing by the CPS for the 21 days, but instead will be processed immediately and will automatically receive a reject 16. Some students have already received SARs and ISIRs as a result of this situation. Those 1996-97 FAFSA Express filers who have indicated that they would be sending in their signature pages are having their application records held by the CPS (for longer than the 21 days) until the startup of history correction processing. As indicated in this morning's announcement from Deputy Assistant Secretary Hicks' letter, history correction startup is scheduled to begin on March 15 and all these students' records (approximately 2,000 to date) are scheduled to be processed immediately after startup. C. NSLDS and duplicate loan records The National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) Division has identified a problem in the NSLDS with duplicate loan records. In an attempt to fix a problem with the Loan Date field on several NSLDS records, the Direct Loan servicer inadvertently sent a batch of Direct Loan records containing modified loan dates to the NSLDS. Due to the way that NSLDS is configured, these modified records have the appearance of being new loans. This has resulted in students receiving SARs that contain erroneously inflated aggregate loan amounts. NSLDS and the Direct Loan servicer are working together to identify and eliminate these duplicate loan records. Although it has not yet been determined how many student records there are that contain these duplicate loan entries, it appears that only records of some (not all) Direct Loan borrowers are affected. D. NSLDS and FATs Beginning with the 1996-97 award year, the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) may be used by postsecondary educational institutions to meet the regulatory requirements for obtaining a financial aid transcript (FAT) information for most Title IV student aid applicants. An exception to this allowance of the use of NSLDS for FAT purposes applies to midyear transfer students. Institutions may determine eligibility by using NSLDS information presented on a Student Aid Report (SAR) or contained in the NSLDS History section of the Institutional Student Information Report ISIR. Institutions may also obtain FAT information directly from the NSLDS. We will distribute a Dear Colleague Letter soon that will provide details on the use of the NSLDS for FAT purposes. We remind schools that they are still required to respond to requests for FAT information from other institutions. E. 1996-97 EDE Technical Reference The 1996-97 EDE Technical Reference is now available for downloading from the SFA BBS. The files, which are in WordPerfect 5.1 format, can be found under the SFA Publications menu pick from the main menu screen. The ISIR Record Layout specifications are contained in the file 'marsec4.96.' If you are not currently a member of the SFA BBS and want to obtain information about how to sign up, please contact Customer Support at 1-800-433-7327. |