With the change this year where you can’t see the actual amounts entered by the retrieval tool, just that there is an amount listed on the line, I opted to hand enter my tax info for my daughter’s FAFSA. I tried the retrieval tool first, but it indicated there was an amount on a line where there should not be, so I deleted and hand entered.
My daughter was not offered any federal aid, which was not a surprise. I knew we likely would not qualify. But, today I received an email from the US Dept of Education with this… “We recommend that you transfer your 2016 tax information electronically from the IRS. If you don’t, you may be required to provide IRS tax return documentation to your child’s school before he or she can receive financial aid.”
Could this have effected how her FAFSA was evaluated?
Are you saying that there were fields filled in where you had a value of $0 or nothing on your tax forms? There is NOTHING wrong with that. Some fields will look filled in…but the actual values will be 0.
Filling in or using the DRT would NOT affect the way the FAFSA calculations were done…assuming you entered everything accurately.
They are just giving you a heads up that the colleges might want to have official documentation of what you enetered on your FAFSA…most do.
Colleges verify income and tax info…they do it in one of several ways.
Family links to the IRS DRT and information is imported directly off the tax return.
If you don’t use the DRT, order a tax transcript...because very likely you will need one if the college wants to verify your income.
Some colleges request signed copies of tax returns.
If it’s a Profile school that also uses IDOC, the document requests would be part of the IDOC documents.
I don’t think filling the form in without the DRT resulted in less federal aid being awarded. It could result in federal aid not being released until verification.
Did you get an EFC after completing the form manually? That EFC will tell you if you qualify for Pell grants, and give you a pretty good idea if the school will award an SEOG or work study too.
My daughter also got that email from FASFA today. I was going to use the DRT when we filled it out in October but it wouldn’t let me access it so I just manually typed in our information (I thought maybe because our taxes were hacked last year). So far we have all but one financial aid package from her prospective schools and none of them are missing the option for the $5500 in federal loans. I was just going to ignore this email.
"Our records indicate that you did not use the IRS Data Retrieval Tool to provide your tax information on the 2018–19 FAFSA form.
We recommend that you log in to your 2018–19 FAFSA form and transfer your 2016 tax information electronically from the IRS. If you don’t, you may be required to provide IRS tax return documentation to your school before you can receive financial aid."
Good Point… my daughters financial aid packages also all had the $5500 federal loans. I guess that is confirmation that the FAFSA was processed even if she did not get anything else.