| PublicationDate: 2/11/2000 Summary: Change to 2000-2001 Automatic Zero EFC Parameter Author: General Manager: SFA Student Channel Posted on February 11, 2000 To: Financial Aid Administrators From: U.S. Department of Education, Student Financial Assistance Re: Change to 2000-2001 Automatic Zero EFC Parameter We discovered that the parameter for determining automatic zero EFC eligibility needed to change in the 2000-2001 Central Processing System (CPS). The parameter associated with setting the automatic zero EFC calculation for 2000-2001 has been modified to $13,000 from the prior years' value of $12,000. This change was based on IRS Publication 596 and the Higher Education Amendments Section 479A. Unfortunately, we had processed ninety-six (96) applicant records affected by this change before the fix was made to CPS. The CPS was modified on Thursday, February 3, 2000. All records processed after that date use the correct parameter. The affected 96 applicants received an EFC higher than zero because their income was between the $12,000 and $13,000 parameter. Since the affected volume is very small, CPS will not reprocess these records but instead will issue an "automatic" correction to generate a new transaction. This will apply the correct calculation to the applicant record. We will send a letter to the student with a new SAR explaining the reason for the revision. In addition, a new ISIR will be sent to schools for the affected students. Unfortunately, there is no precise way to determine which are the affected ISIRs, but you can search on ISIR field 159 (value = 81) which indicates that the transaction was generated by NCS at the PIC site, along with a search on ISIR field 140 (value = Y) which indicates that the transaction meets the automatic zero EFC. You should expect to see these ISIRs no later than Wednesday, February 16. We also made the modification to the estimated EFC calculations in FAFSA on the Web and Renewal Application on the Web as of Friday, February 11, 2000. A new version of FAFSA Express will be available on the SFADownload site on Monday, February 14, 2000. EDExpress will be modified and version 6.0.1 of the software will be available on the SFADownload site by Tuesday, February 15, 2000. The address for the download site is http://fsadownload.ed.gov/index.htm/. We regret any inconvenience this change has caused you and your students. If you have any questions relating to the CPS reprocessing, please call CPS Customer Service at 800-330-5947 option 2, or via email at mailto:CPS@NCS.COM. If you have technical questions about our SFA systems and software, you may want to subscribe to our e-mail list serve, SFATECH. For more information about SFATECH, including how to subscribe, look on-line at http://www.ed.gov. |