Did anyone’s financial aid application get put on hold? I got a mail from the university saying I have to submit a verification of nonfiling letter, but I have no way of getting it. I’ve never paid taxes before. Has anyone been able to solve this problem?
@ilovemypug I was actually just looking into this yesterday. Maybe someone with more experience can confirm?
We have not gotten this request from UMN (yet), but we did receive it from St. Norbert. From what I read, if you have never filed taxes before, you must request the non-filer statement from the IRS by manually filling out the paper form and either mailing or faxing it to the IRS. I read it’s important to have the statement sent back to you and not directly to the school.
Here is a link for the form:
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f4506t.pdf
Here is a link for some instructions on found on Marquette’s website (just found it helpful). I think we may also get a request from them for my son for this statement.
http://www.marquette.edu/mucentral/financialaid/resources_non_filing_letter_instructions_1718.shtml
Hope this helps!
Does this include a situation in which the parents have filed but the dependent (i.e. student) hasn’t needed to? Is verification of this a sure thing (i.e. if you haven’t filed you will 100% be asked for it) or random (i.e. some are asked like for other verification items, but some aren’t)? Thanks for filling me in!
In the case of St. Norbert, they have our FAFSA so I thought we were all set.
In our case, parents filed and did the DRT thing with the FAFSA. Son had no income and has never filed. My son got an email asking him to log into the portal to see what docs are missing. They are requesting copies of parents’ W2s and the IRS non-filing statement for my son (or tax transcript which he does not have).
This took me by surprise - I thought they would just go based on the FAFSA. I have no idea if this is required for everyone or just some…
In researching yesterday, I read that some parents have their students file taxes whether they need to or not (provided they have some sort of income). That way they can avoid the whole trying to get the non-filing statement thing and just do the DRT for the student on the FAFSA. We will definitely do this next year as son had a job for 3 months in 2016.
Good advice about having your kids file even if they don’t need to - I’m thinking my own son who will apply for fall 2019 should probably file this year, even if he doesn’t have wage earnings. I believe that’s Prior-prior (tax year 2017 for the 2019-20 school year). D17 filed last year for the first time so thankfully we were able to include her tax return. She has applied to three schools that require us to submit W2’s and 1099’s along with the FAFSA. I think it depends on the school and perhaps whether they have institutional funds available for need-based aid.
Just wanted to follow up. He scanned and emailed the W2s to SNC last night. I faxed the non-filing request form to the IRS this morning. He just got an email from St. Norbert saying they got the W2s and will waive the non-filing statement for him. I guess at least we will have it (at some point) if any other schools request it.
I just overcame this crisis. Simply spreading the word. I was fishing around here too trying to find an answer, but couldn’t find nada. But yeah here’s my thread…I hope it helps…
@HerrotMaster12 That is so helpful! Thank you very much for sharing!