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The Department of Education has implemented a temporary fix to the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) that will allow students with parents or guardians who lack a social security number to complete the form, under secretary of education James Kvaal told reporters at a press briefing Tuesday.
After months of frustration over persistent technical glitches, the fix will allow mixed-status families to bypass the identity verification system that had been causing problems, enabling them to enter their tax information manually instead of having the system retrieve it from the IRS. The applicants will still have to complete the verification process, but will no longer have to wait until it’s done to make a studentaid.gov account and access the online form.
“The new process will substantially streamline the FAFSA application for applicants who lack social security numbers,” Kvaal said.
Since the glitch was first flagged in January, when the new form launched, the department has tried multiple workarounds and temporary solutions, to no avail. Even as a slew of other technical issues were resolved, and new issues have cropped up since, the social security number issue remained intractable.
Until Tuesday, the department was recommending that mixed-status applicants fill out paper FAFSAs instead, meaning their federal aid information would have been processed much more slowly. A department spokesperson recommended that with the new fix, affected students should use the online form instead—even if they’ve already filled out a paper form.
In the same press call, Kvaal said the department had finished reprocessing the roughly half a million forms affected by calculation and tax errors, and that more than one million mistakes have been corrected on the student side. Those submitting a form today can expect a 1- to 3-day turnaround on processing, he said, and all ISIRs (institutional student information records) currently being sent to colleges are accurate and ready to use in packaging aid offers.
“We know how important this is and we will continue to do whatever we can to get students all of the financial aid for which they are eligible, and to help colleges make financial aid offers as quickly as possible,” he said. “If you’ve been waiting for the dust to settle to fill out a form, now is the time to do so.”
