Just thought I’d share that the new FAFSA has a new logic that will request information about rollover amounts after using the IRS DRT if the parent indicated that they had an untaxed rollover amount. Yea! (I’m not 100% sure exactly how/when the questions appear when completing the FAFSA, because I only have screen shots, but at least it’s addressed. Once I can view a demo, I’ll report on how it all works.)
There are still too many confusing questions, IMHO, but every move in the right direction is a good thing.
In the past, if you transferred your information using the DRT, it didn’t take the rollover into account. It ended up increasing EFC … the aid office could fix it with documentation, but the family had to know to tell the financial aid office about the rollover & ask that their info be updated by the aid office. This flaw was a something people on this forum noted in the past, and it’s good to know that it has been addressed.
I just did a DRT on FAFSA against a tax return that included IRA Rollover without changing the EFC.
It did not request the rollover amount but the Help did state that rollover amount should be taken out.
DRT still attempts to add the whole amount of IRA distribution into the field but you can manually wipe it out to zero and DRT will still display (Transferred from IRS) and let you submit without errors. Hopefully this is what the college will see on their end. I think usually if you try to change transferred field it would give you a warning so it seems this field is editable now. I hope I did it correctly.
I want to thank @kelsmom for this thread as I would otherwise abort the DRT and opt for Tax transcript like last year.
It would be helpful if on the resulting SAR the fields successfully transferred from IRS were marked somehow to eliminate any doubts.
The colleges will see the changes you made. It is possible that they may reach out to you to ask for documentation of the rollover amount, so just be aware (ask your child to watch for emails from the school).
Why can’t the FAFSA just have a question like it does for work study? Just ask if the person had a roll ever…and the amount. I mean really…how hard would,that be?
We are repeating discussion from a year ago. DRT is trying to verify FAFSA against the tax return and it should be able to pull all the necessary info from it without asking any questions. Obviously programming logic will be a little complicated. Instead it blindly takes the amount from 15a and tells you to correct it if you had a rollover. Obviously if FAFSA asks this rollover question and DRT uses your answer for calculations then the result is still not trustworthy.
If Feds cannot do it properly then they should just drop this field from DRT verification.
This depends on the tax software and maybe on the nature of the rollover. For me TurboTax did not put “ROLLOVER” on the 1st page.
hi everyone, esp @kelsmom and @CCDD14 - i’m running into this issue. While using DRT, we zeroed out the rollover amount and submitted, but it doesn’t appear to have logged that the parents finances utilized DRT. On 2 of the schools websites, everything is marked complete except for ‘parents irs transcript’ and ‘verification’ (the student transcript IS marked complete). Also on the fafsa itself, if we start another correction, it shows for the student ‘you’ve already used DRT’, but not so for the parent section.
It’s as if manually zeroing the field has negated using DRT.
i’m going to go ahead and send our parent transcript (with an explanation) to all the schools once we get it, but fafsa/DRT process definitely appears to still have a problem. Any of you are welcome to shed some light or correct me if i’m misunderstanding any of this. Thanks!
@lz57c4, exactly in the same boat here. It seems altering one field caused the whole FAFSA Parent portion to be marked unverified. Finaid office told me that I should not have overridden DRT and they would have accounted for rollover internally but I have my doubts. This is not a FAFSA-only school so this is not important for finaid but may disqualify from subsidized loans so I prefer to have a correct Fed EFC.
We agreed with finaid that I will mail them tax transcript. It seems online transcripts are not available any more, probably because of all tax scams last year.
I feel sorry for all parents who have to deal with this during application process.
Altering the DRT portion may trigger a code saying that the info was transferred & then altered … which would then prompt the need to collect the necessary information to prove the rollover. I have an issue with this if it’s true, because it creates additional issues. In one way, it does allow the parent to know that if they don’t make the adjustment, the EFC is inflated … so that is good, I suppose. I have a big problem with schools stating that “you shouldn’t have overridden the DRT” when the FAFSA gives you that option! Instead, they should have policies & procedures in place to identify adjustments made to the DRT info for rollovers & collect the info they need to resolve the issue. It’s not your fault, but it’s their issue to resolve.
It shouldn’t. The info should all transfer, but the rollover change might prompt a code telling the aid office the info transferred & was then updated. When that code is triggered, the aid office has to resolve. It doesn’t mean they have to perform a verification if the student was not selected for verification, but they do have to find out what was changed & document that the change was correct (sometimes that means the person has to provide a tax transcript from the IRS - in the case of a rollover, they might have to provide proof of the rollover and/or a tax transcript). Being at a small grad-only school means I don’t have this sort of thing happen, and I haven’t heard anything on my listservs … so I can only guess what might be going on, unfortunately.
the way the fafsa/drt handles this is definitely misleading. when you run the drt, the inserted code stating “Transferred from the IRS” remains present, even after altering the one field. But in the “list of changes”, the “Transferred from the IRS” text is missing, but all the updated values are correct. So I don’t think it’s so much that the schools receive a code saying a drt was modified, i just don’t think there’s any indication that drt was even done.
It’s definitely an area where the coding needs to be modified. We’ll be sending our return transcripts as a solution.
The school gets a code saying it was modified … the school sees different info than you see. There are back-end codes on the ISIR, which is the document the school receives, and schools have to screen for those.