Subpart E Verfication: State, Local, or Tribal

ICRAS 1416 1845-0041 v8 – Affected Public – State, Local or Tribal Governments 8/29/2013

This request is for an extension of the information collection supporting the policies and reporting requirements contained in Subpart E of Part 668 – Verification and Updating of Student Aid Application Information. Sections 668.53, 668.54, 668.55, 668.56, 668.57, 668.59 and 668.61 contain information collection requirements (OMB control number 1845-0041). This subpart governs the verification and updating of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) used to calculate an applicant’s Expected Family Contribution (EFC) for purposes of determining an applicant’s need for student financial assistance under Title IV of Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended (HEA). The collection of this documentation helps ensure that students (and parents in the case of PLUS loans) receive the correct amount of Title IV program assistance by providing accurate information to calculate an applicant’s expected family contribution. There has been no change to the regulatory language since the prior information collection filing.

Section 668.53 – Policies and procedures.

The regulations require that all Title IV program participating institutions establish and use written policies and procedures for the verification of information supplied by aid applicants on the FAFSA. These procedures must be include timeframes for the request for and submission of documentation, applicant responsibilities in the verification process including consequences of the failure to provide the requested data, among other regulatory elements.

Because the items from the FAFSA selected for verification change annually, we estimate that each participating institution will require 2 hours to review their procedures and update any programming to capture the verification items for that award year.

# of Respondents # of Responses Hrs/Response # of Burden Hours

1,896 1,896 X 2 hours 3,792

Section 668.54 – Selection of an applicant’s FAFSA information for verification.

The regulations require that the institution perform verification on all applicants at their institution who are selected by the Department of Education. The regulations also allow for institutions to select applications for institutional verification based on their written policies and procedures. There are also listed allowed exclusions from the verification process.

Because the selection process would be addressed in the updating of policy and procedures and the updating of any programs at the institution we are not including any burden hours for this section of the regulation.

Section 668.55 – Updating information.

The regulations require that all applicants update all dependency status changes throughout the award year, update changes in household size, the number in the household attending postsecondary educational institutions throughout the award year, and under certain situations a financial aid administrator can include changes in an applicant’s marital status.

We estimate that approximately ten percent of the approximate 21 million FAFSA applicants will be required to update information listed above.

# of Respondents # of Responses Hrs/Response # of Burden Hours

* 672,000 X 0.17 114,240

Note - An asterisk (*) is used to avoid double counting the same respondents that has been identified in one of the section breakouts.

Section 668.56 – Information to be verified.

The regulations specify that the Secretary will publish an annual listing of FAFSA information that may be required to be verified. The Federal Register includes a range of information that applicants will need to confirm and the types of acceptable documentation that is to be submitted to substantiate the previously provided information on the FAFSA for each of the items identified.

The review of the Federal Register identifying the verification classifications is part of the annual review of the institution’s policies and procedures identified in Section 668.53, there is no additional burden assessed here.

Section 668.57 – Acceptable documentation.

The regulations clarify acceptable documentation for the specified areas for verification. The regulations also allow the institutions to accept income information provided on the FAFSA if it has been obtained directly from the Internal Revenue Service during the initial application process through the IRS Data Retrieval process when the retrieved data has not been changed by the applicant.

The Department selected about 30 percent of the approximate 21 million FAFSA filers in the 2012-2013 award year. We anticipate it will take the applicant an average of seven minutes to review the verification request and locate the requested documents to provide to the institution.

# of Respondents # of Responses Hrs/Response # of Burden Hours

* 2,016,000 X 0.12 241,920

Note - An asterisk (*) is used to avoid double counting the same respondents that has been identified in one of the section breakouts.

Section 668.59 – Consequences of a change in application information.

The regulations require that all changes to the applicant’s FAFSA information resulting from verification be submitted to the Department for those applicants receiving aid under any of the subsidized student financial assistance programs.

Of the approximate 21 million applicants in the 2012-2013 award year, we estimate that about 6.3 million applicants will be selected for verification. Based upon the average number of transactions as a consequence of a change in FAFSA information, we believe that the 6.3 million applicants verified will have an average of 2.5 transactions per applicant selected to complete the verification/data correction process yielding 15,750,000 responses. We expect the average amount of time per response to be 7.4 minutes (.12 hours) for a total of 1,890,000 hours of burden.

# of Respondents # of Responses Hrs/Response # of Burden Hours

* 5,040,000 X 0.12 604,800

Note - An asterisk (*) is used to avoid double counting the same respondents that has been identified in one of the section breakouts.

Section 668.61 – Recovery of funds from interim disbursements.

The regulations outline the efforts that institutions must make to recover funds from students who received an interim disbursement of Title IV, HEA student financial assistance and who, through the verification process, are determined to have received more funding than they were eligible to receive. Due to the risks of owing repayments of program funds for students who do not complete verification or are shown to be ineligible due to the completion of verification few institutions process interim disbursements. Therefore the Department has determined that any burden on the institutions would be negligible.

TOTALS

Responses 7,729896

Respondents 1,896

Burden Hours 964,752