I have been filling out FAFSA for a couple of years, in this case for my current Freshman, rising Sophomore.
I have never used DRT before but had no trouble accessing.
Here is the problem, in 2016 we did not use the American Opportunity Tax Credit (we did have a college student but did not use it), or Tax Exmpt Interest Income, or untaxed pension distributions (we had distributions but they were taxed and we reported them). However on the FAFSA form all those boxes are checked but I cannot see the amounts. Would these boxes be checked if the amount was 0? Will I ever be able to see the amounts?
Are they checked for everyone even if they are 0?
Other things that we do not have are not checked at all. I am very concerned since I cannot see the amount. I am thinking of clearing it, can I even do that? and starting over but I am worried about being selected for verification
It seems from additional reading I have done that these categories will always say Transferred from IRS regardless of whether the amount is 0 or not. Is this true?
In my case I did not have any untaxed pension distributions for example, so it did not ask me the additional question of whether any was a rollover, so does that mean it knows I did not have any?
So why is it listing anything??? The box should not even have been checked by DRT since we do not have that category for example exempt IRA distributions. It is one thing when you could see the amount, now I cannot see that it says 0 which is what it should.
Thank you @thumper1. I do not want to find out after the fact that the EFC is way high. My child’s school is large and I do not want to go through the red tape. I simply could not understand why any information is listed as transferred when the amount was 0. I would much rather my EFC is correct than to have to go back and correct it
No I do not have an SAR because I am still doing the FAFSA
What I am asking is when people were doing the FAFSA, did everyone have categories checked that did not apply to them and it said Transferred from IRS? Is that what it is supposed to say even if they do not have Exempt Interest and the box is not something they would have checked in the first place
Yes, I believe that the checkmark means the the DRT was synced to the FAFSA for those categories. Some tax programs like TaxAct or TurboTax put zeros in those boxes, some leave them blank.
If you don’t want to trust the DRT because it is now blind, just hand enter all the information from your returns.
But clearly the program is set to pick up those items whether there is anything listed in them or not. If you don’t trust it, don’t use it. You said you haven’t used it in the past, so just do it like you’ve done in the past.
Those are your choices, use the DRT and not know what information is being pulled or do it manually and perhaps get asked to verify. If you think the DRT is pulling information that isn’t there (haven’t heard of that happening) do it by hand.
If it IS pulling the wrong information, you are going to have to get a tax transcript anyway to prove it. You’ll be able to tell if there is a mistake if the EFC is far off from your last year’s EFC.
The information is transferred directly from the IRS. If no income is reported to the IRS for an item, no income will transfer to the FAFSA for that item. I assume the fact that it is checked means that that particular item was reviewed in the IRS DRT process. If it was 0 or blank, 0 would transfer (if you look at a tax transcript, there will be 0’s for items you left blank on your return).
I looked at my S’s printout of the 2018/19 FAFSA summary report. And yes, fields 94b, 94d, 94e, 94f have “transferred from the IRS” in the field, even though we didn’t have any values for those on our tax return.
I compared my FAFSA EFC with the one calculated by Collegeboard EFC calculator (federal methodology), which I have found accurate in the past, and I calculated the EFC with the @rgosula FAFSA spreadsheet as well, all came out the same.
So I trust that the DRT reported our tax information correctly.