Publication Date: December 20, 2002
Author: General Manager: FSA Schools Channel
Summary: Pell Grant Award Amount Cents/Rounding Software Fix
Posted on 12-20-2002
Award Year 2002-2003
Summary: Pell Grant Award Amount Cents/Rounding Software Fix
TO: All Destination Points
FROM: Common Origination and Disbursement (COD)
RE: Update to August 9, 2002 COD Message on Pell Grant Award Amount Cents/Rounding for the 2002-2003 Award Year: A Software Fix Has Been Implemented
As reported in an August 9, 2002 posting to the COD section of IFAP, the COD system was not allowing the optional use of cents on the Pell Grant Award Amount (that is, the Origination Award Amount) field for the 2002-03 award year when the COD system was performing validation and correction calculations. This was in conflict with the Technical Reference, which stated that beginning with 2002-03, schools would have the option to report either (a) cents in the award amount or (b) round up the award amount to the next whole dollar. As a result, if a school submitted an award amount that needed to be corrected, COD would correct the award to cents, even if the school had submitted the amount in whole dollars. Under this circumstance, the COD system should have provided for a corrected amount rounded up to the nearest whole dollar. Full Participant schools may choose not to have COD correct Pell records. In this case, the entire record would have been rejected.
As of December 17, 2002, the COD system has been fixed so as to now allow the Pell Grant award amount to be rounded up to the next whole dollar.
Award amount data that was previously corrected by COD using cents in the award amount field or, for some Full Participants, rejected, cannot be automatically re-processed by COD. If any of your records were corrected to cents and you now want to round to the nearest whole dollar (or if you are a Full Participant school whose records were rejected for this reason), please resubmit the records to obtain any additional amounts. For example, if a school submitted $2,190.00 as the award (origination) amount, but based on all the other required data provided, the COD calculated award amount was corrected to $2,189.22, the school may submit an award amount change for $2,190.00 to receive the additional 78 cents. Please note that a change to the origination amount must occur before a disbursement can occur: In this example, if the school tries to disburse the full $2,190.00, but does not submit the award (origination) amount change to raise the award amount to $2,190.00, then the disbursement amount will again be corrected using cents in the disbursement amount field. This is because the maximum award amount on file within COD will still be $2,189.22 and a disbursement cannot exceed the maximum award amount.
Thank you for your patience as we fixed what was an unintended error in COD processing.
If you have any questions about resubmitting your records, please contact the COD School Relations Center at (800) 4PGRANT, or e-mail CODSupport@acs-inc.com.