<p>Thanks to everyone’s advice and expertise, I was able to call and find out who changed the info (UMiami) and then call their FA office and know more about the proper procedures than the person (student?) who answered my call. Seems they never asked for, so we never sent, the K-1. I think a newbie was doing verifications and just did not understand the complexities of self-employment. When I suggested sending them a copy of the K-1, the student said “Cool! That would be great!”. I am stressing and they say cool???</p>
<p>I am faxing them a copy from work tomorrow along with a detailed explanantion of the “rules” in case my fax falls into the hands of another “newbie”. I think it will take time, but was just an error. Time will tell.</p>
<p>I spoke with a senior financial aid officer today and she acknowleged that question # 89 and 90 should be taken from the K-1 form 1065 box #14. She said they will change her FAFSA back to what it was in the begining and do it today! Yeah!</p>
<p>But… she said for questions # 96 and #97 the University of Miami lists all students as 1 in household and 1 in college. Everything I have read on the web says that this section is ONLY to be filled out for independent students. I asked her about that and she said that UM does this for all their students and that they can fill it out however they want to. Is this correct? Can they really just change how the form is supposed to be filled out? Why do they do this? Does this raise or lower the EFC?</p>
<p>For a dependent student, the info for student’s number in HH/college is irrelevant. Only the parent HH size/# in college is used in the formula for a dependent student. So their 1/1 change won’t affect anything.</p>
<p>Not a financial aid officer but I don’t think it will make any difference at all. The dependency questions (48-60) are the ones that establish whether she is a dependent or independent student. She is a dependent based on those so what they put in 96 and 97 is meaningless - it will not override 48-60. Though it seems odd that they do that as, according to the instructions, those questions are only supposed to be answered if any of the answers to 48-60 are yes. </p>
<p>It probably has something to do with how they run reports - they may need to look at “students who said they are unmarried and have a household size and number in college not equal to 1 and 1.” If the dependent student answered the HH size/number in college questions on the student section, that report is going to have some bad info. Changing students who are dependent to 1/1 probably avoids that (of course, they could always add "and dependency status = dependent … but I don’t know how their system works).</p>