Subpart E Verification: Individuals

1845-0041 – Affected Public - Individuals 11/10/2016

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 668.55 – 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

Individuals

** 2,000,000 X 0.08 160,000

The double asterisk denotes this group as a subsection of the individuals identified in section 668.57 and is used to avoid double counting the same respondent.

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 twenty minutes to review the verification request and gather the requested documents to provide to the institution.

Affected Parties:

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

Individuals

6,000,000 6,000,000 X 0.33 1.980,000

TOTALS

Respondents 6,000,000

Responses 8,000,000

Burden Hours 1,216,000