SFA Information for Financial Aid Professionals
U.S. Department of Education
| PublicationDate: 11/29/99 Summary: Student Financial Aid Year 2000 Project Status As of 26 November, 1999 Author: PSS - Program Systems Service As of 26 November, 1999 Year 2000 is rapidly approaching and the Department of Education is encouraging those schools and third party servicers for postsecondary student financial aids to test with the Office of Student Financial Assistance (OSFA) systems as soon as possible! OSFA encourages each institution (school or servicer), EDExpress or others to test their data exchange with the following systems during the windows of opportunity listed below. Testing plans and test cases can be found at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocio/index.html. Y2K School Testing Schedule Change: ED has decided to extend the Y2K school trading exchange testing from November 19 to December 17,1999 (Dec. 20 for DLOS/LC). Please take advantage of this opportunity to mitigate Year 2000 risk in your data exchange with the Department. Schools that want to test with NSLDS need to contact Sandra Fowler of ED, i.e., Sandra ONLY be called if schools want to test with NSLDS. Scheduled Dates for Institution Testing
Contact Persons for the Y2K School Testing: For general questions: Dan Callahan (202) 260 - 8644 For individual systems: CPS (Central Processing System): Frank Kidd (202) 260 0533 DLOS (Direct Loan Origination System): Chuck Mahaney (202) 708 - 7365 NSLDS (National Student Loan Data System): Sandra Fowler (202) 260 -1115 RFMS (Recipient and Financial Management System): Jana Henderson (202) 708 - 8698 Updated on 11/26/99! Statistics on Y2K Participating School Testing (as of 11/19/1999; not including schools serviced by third party servicers; DLOS data is up to 11/12/1999): Servicer Role in Testing: Our largest contingent of partners consists of the schools, and we have strongly urged that every school test its system with ours. Since many schools rely on third-party service providers for student aid servicing, we are soliciting those providers to test their data exchanges with each of our systems. Responses from the schools to our outreach program have included several requests that we encourage service providers to test with our systems, and to publicly acknowledge successes on our web site. If your school employs a servicer for processing postsecondary student aid programs with the Department, you are strongly encouraged to ask your servicer to test with the Department. Honor Role: As an incentive to schools, we have been posting, and will continue to post, successfully tested school names on the "School Testing Honor Roll" on the Department's Y2K web pages -- see http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocio/index.html. We are now instituting a separate page to list Servicers that successfully test with us. When any Servicer has successfully tested its data exchanges with the applicable ED systems, that Servicer will be acknowledged by the Department for having done so. This acknowledgement would indicate the Servicer's readiness to exchange data with us in a Y2K-compliant manner, and thus provide assurance to its clients and customers of Y2K preparedness. Specific Reminders on Testing: Institutions performing Y2K testing with RFMS: If you use only the 1999-2000 EDExpress and EDconnect software provided by the Department for all of your financial aid processing, the Department has already certified the EDExpress and EDconnect software for Y2K compliance. However, we encourage all Pell schools to participate in the RFMS Y2K testing. Institutions performing Y2K testing with DLOS: The Direct Loan Origination System Y2K School Testing test case has changed (updated on ED Web on Sept. 28, 1999) to reflect a new legislative change on the origination fee from 4% to 3% effective Aug. 15, 1999. Before conducting the test, DLOS schools are reminded to review the test cases at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocio/index.html (The file is in the Year 2000 School and Trading Partner Test Plan under 2.4.1.4 Direct Loan Student Origination/Consolidation.) Institutions performing Y2K testing with CPS: ED advises schools to create and separate database in EDExpress and download Y2K files to a separate directory using EDConnect. Institutions need to enter all 12 test FAFSAs without making significant data entry errors, and export with the system date set to 02/29/2000, in order to pass the test. Those schools who use EDExpress to participate in Year 2000 testing with the Department will get a message stating they need an access date password when they set their system clock back to the current date. This is because they are attempting to access the software with a system date earlier than last entered. They should call CPS Customer Service at 800-330-5947 to get the access date password. They should also tell the Customer Service Representative that the call is Y2K related so they are not charged for the call. General Reminder on Testing: The test results have shown that some of the testing challenges schools are experiencing are not always Year 2000 related. Common problems include: Invalid data: a non-Y2K problem due to data entry errors - an invalid test case which didn't make it to the compute stage, for example, such as in CPS school testing; Not following test procedures: not setting the system clock ahead or not using the ED-provided test data; Wrong data format: errors such as gaps in the data fields or data not properly formatted as required. Careful preparation of data for the test and use of the test cases as a checklist will aid in successful testing. Updated on 11/26/99! Business Contingency Planning: The Office of Student Financial Assistance posted to the Department's web site (http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocio/index.html) its contingency plan that was submitted to OMB on June 15, 1999. This plan provides business continuity should there be a disruption related to the Year 2000 problem in any of the OSFA mission critical business processes. We have revised the plan and recently posted the revisions to the web site. The following individual business process plans are revised: Student Aid Origination and Disbursement; Lender and Guaranty Agency Payments; Repayment and Collections; Customer Service; and FFEL Origination, Disbursement, Repayment, and Collections. These revisions include plans that replace the previous ED plans that would have advanced funds to schools in December 1999 from what would have been normal January 2000 disbursements. We encourage you to review and comment on this plan. We also encourage you to develop contingency plans for your critical business processes so that there will not be any disruptions at your institution. To ensure that the OSFA contingency plan will work in the unlikely event that there is a Y2K disruption, we are testing the plans. This testing will continue through early December. We will be conducting a session on Y2K readiness, including contingency planning, at the upcoming Department's San Antonio Electronic Access Conference (EAC). The session "Are Your Systems Ready to Power Up for YR - 2000" (Session #38) will be from 10:30 AM to 11:45 AM on December 16th and from 1:15 PM to 2:30 PM on December 17th. In conclusion, OSFA wants to ensure that the student financial assistance community will not be disrupted on account of the Year 2000 problem. The SFA Year 2000 project team may be reached via email at: OPE_Y2K@ED.GOV. |