More than 30 years ago my wife worked for a company that gave her some stock, I believe it was an ESOP plan. For the past few years the holder of the stock has been after us to sell it as we owned under a hundred shares. We had always included it under investments on the FAFSA. We finally gave in as they were getting pretty insistent. It was sold in January and put into a stock mutual fund. We forgot about until we received the 1099 this past weekend. We had already filed taxes and the fafsa. It’s rather irksome as we have no more money than we did before but I believe it will increase our income for fafsa purposes. It’s not a lot of money but it doesn’t help. Since it is in the stock mutual fund do we count it as income, savings, or both for the purpose of filing the amended fafsa? If I am correct we will be using the same figures for next year. This $3600 stock sale may cost me almost as much as we had invested. 
If you had any capital gain on the sale of the stock, that will count as income for 2015. The value of the stock mutual fund, as of the day of filing FAFSA, is reported as an asset.
For next year, assuming you have not sold any of the stock mutual fund, you will only report the value of the mutual fund as an asset as of the day of filing FAFSA. If you sell any of the stock mutual fund in 2016 and have a capital gain, that gain will be reported as 2016 income.
Sadly next year they will use 2015 taxes to determine EFC for 2017/2018 as well. So I do have to report it both as income and as an asset even though I have the same amount of money as I did the year before (less taxes)? That is what I was afraid of.
Ah, yes; I forgot about going to prior-prior year for the 2017-2018 FAFSA and Profile. If you are applying for need-based financial aid, 2015 was not the year to sell assets or have a higher than normal income.
Something similar happened to us a few years ago. We had filed our tax return in January. Then in February we received a 1099-R from a retirement account rollover we forgot all about. We amended our tax return. It did not change our AGI and therefore neither the tax we owed, but since we received the 1099-R and we assumed the IRS did as well and we were supposed to report it on our tax return, we amended.
If you amend you can’t use DRT in FAFSA I think. So you might have to order a tax transcript or supply the school with your original and amended return.
Also when my former workplace changed ownership, they paid out the employee stock ownership plan to all employees. We could choose to have it directly rolled over into an IRA, that’s what I did.
When we sold it we did not know they were going to change to the prior prior year calculation and frankly it was an oversight on our part to forget the tax implication. We just wanted to quit getting letters. My wife is an avid record keeper so she’s looking through 30 years worth of statements to determine how much of a basis we have. Normally it wouldn’t be worth it and I’d just pay the taxes but it could save us money on 2 years worth of EFC (we have two kids in college at the moment).
Right; nothing you can do about it after the fact. I’m sure a lot of folks made financial moves in the first part of 2015 that they wouldn’t have made if the FA powers that be had given more notice of this major change in FA policy.