Subpart E Verfication: State, Local, or Tribal

1845-0041 – Affected Public – State, Local or Tribal Governments 08/30/2016

This request is for a revision 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. There has been no change to the regulatory language since the prior information collection filing. The regulations require the verification process to include the updating of a student’s marital status during the award year when the institution determines that the update is necessary to address an inequity or reflect more accurately the applicant’s ability to pay. The regulations identify the number of items to be verified as an average of three data elements as selected on an individual basis. The regulations require that all data changes be transmitted to the Department in order to insure that our systems contain correct data. The decrease in respondents, responses and burden hours is due to a decrease in participating institutions and FAFSA filings from the prior collection.

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.

Affected Parties:

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

Public institutions

1,877 1,877 X 2 hours 3,754

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 20 million FAFSA applicants will be required to update information listed above.

Affected Parties:

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

Public Institutions

* 660,000 X 0.17 112,200

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 20 million FAFSA filers in the 2015-2016 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.

Affected Parties:

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

Public Institutions

* 1,980,000 X 0.12 237,600

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 20 million applicants in the 2015-2016 award year, we estimate that about 6 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 million applicants verified will have an average of 2.5 transactions per applicant selected to complete the verification/data correction process yielding 15,000,000 responses. We expect the average amount of time per response to be about 7 minutes (.12 hours) for a total of 1,800,000 hours of burden.

Affected Parties:

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

Public Institutions

* 4,950,000 X 0.12 594,000

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

TOTALS

Respondents 1,877

Responses 7,591,877

Burden Hours 947,554