FAFSA error: You reported a total amount ... that is high for the other income amounts reported.

Paying for College
1

If you enter an amount for this field (formerly 46D):

“Student college grant and scholarship aid reported to the IRS in your income. Includes AmeriCorps benefits (awards, living allowances, and interest accrual payments), as well as grant and scholarship portions of fellowships and assistantships”

…and if you receive this error prior to submitting your FAFSA:

“You reported a total amount from the student’s additional financial information fields that is high for the other income amounts reported.”

…then you might wonder what’s causing this and how to get around it.

Short answer: You will receive this error if the value in “Student college grant and scholarship aid reported to the IRS in your income” is greater than 50% of your reported Adjusted Gross Income (AGI).

You can prove this out by entering the following numbers on your FAFSA and trying to advance to the submission page:

Adjusted Gross Income: $1000
Student college grant and scholarship aid reported to the IRS in your income: $501
Result: Fail

Adjusted Gross Income: $1000
Student college grant and scholarship aid reported to the IRS in your income: $500
Result: Succeed

It doesn’t matter what you enter for your “How much did you earn from working?” question; it only matters that your taxable scholarship aid is more that half your AGI.

I don’t know why this no-more-than-50% requirement should be enforced, because it’s possible that you (the student) didn’t earn any income in a given tax year apart from the scholarship reported as income on your tax return, in which 100% of your AGI would be from scholarship income.

The only way I know to get around this is to report scholarship income that’s no more than 50% of AGI. In my case, the scholarship income was for the first (fall 2017) semester of my D’s college career. Perhaps FAFSA thinks the AGI covers the full 2017-2018 school year, while the “scholarship income” covers only the fall semester. I don’t know. I simply cut in half the the scholarship income I would have reported for the fall 2017 semester, and that allowed me to avoid the error.

2

If the student filed a tax return then use the DRT to import the tax return info into the FAFSA.

Then answer the question about how much of taxable scholarship was reported on tax return as part of AGI.

That should be listed next to wages line on tax return with SCH

If the student had taxable income from scholarships and grants, then he needs to report that. He needs to report it for the tax year in which he received it.

But it can be offset by tuition, fees or book expenses paid.

3

In fact I did enter the amount of taxable tuition income as you described. But the FAFSA does not allow this amount to be more than 50% of the AGI.

This, in my opinion, is a bug in the FAFSA.

It’s arbitrary.

If I put $1000 AGI and $501 taxable scholarship income, I get the error. But if enter $500 taxable scholarship income, I don’t get the error.

If I put $2000 AGI and $1001 taxable scholarship income, I get the error. But if enter $1000 taxable scholarship income, I don’t get the error.

If I put $5000 AGI and $2501 taxable scholarship income, I get the error. But if enter $2500 taxable scholarship income, I don’t get the error.

It doesn’t matter who your are or what your circumstances are: If you enter a taxable scholarship income amount greater than 50% of AGI, you WILL get the error. Makes no sense, since it’s legitimate for your taxable scholarship income amount to be more than 50% of your AGI.

I will report this bug to FAFSA directly.

4

I don’t know. I have filed FAFSA for several years with my D reporting work and taxable scholarship income. At first her taxable scholarship amount was higher than the work income, now it is less than her work income.

I use the DRT and it brings AGI and income earned from work over from the tax return.
Then I answer the question about how much we reported in taxable scholarships as part of AGI.

I don’t remember getting that error in previous years.

5

I also had a son who had more scholarship income than work income in the past, and this never was a problem before. I wonder if there’s something special about the first fall semester of a student’s college career that triggers this 50% requirement.

Note that, in my experience, the only two operative numbers are AGI and taxable scholarship income; the system doesn’t care what you enter for work income. You can make up any numbers you want for AGI and taxable scholarship income, and if the AGI isn’t at least double the scholarship income, you’ll get the error.

I’d be interested to know if someone else out there could corroborate this by entering a taxable scholarship income amount that’s more than 50% of the AGI amount (if the AGI amount is an odd number, you may need to add $2 to the 50% to trigger the error).

6

Ok, problem solved, though I can’t say why. Yesterday I had manually entered my daughter’s 1040 tax return information because the IRS Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) wasn’t available due to maintenance. This morning I couldn’t connect because my daughter wasn’t available. This afternoon I called her and we were able to connect using the DRT.

After pulling her tax information using the DRT, it worked like a charm–we were able to enter the full taxable scholarship amount, and there were no errors.

Unfortunately, because the FAFSA hides automatically linked 1040 numbers from the DRT, I cannot tell what was different between the automatically retrieved numbers and the numbers I dutifully entered from her 1040 while following the FAFSA instructions to a tee.

So mommdc, you were right–using the DRT is the way to go. But I still maintain I should have been able to enter the numbers manually and not be stopped by this 50% rule. The AGI I entered manually from her 1040 is presumably the same AGI the DRT pulled in, and in both cases I entered the same taxable scholarship amount, so the results should have been the same, but they were not. Not a good experience.

7

I don’t think it is uncommon to have more in scholarships than in income. My daughter did every year. In fact for 2 years she only had scholarship income so it was 100% of her reported income. We never had a problem.

8

Yes, that’s why I was puzzled. Using the automated Data Retrieval Tool solved the problem for me. I still think there’s a bug when you enter the 1040 information manually.