New tax verification options make FAFSA process easier for applicants
By David Yaghutiel
April 27, 2017 12:10 a.m.
People applying for financial aid at colleges and universities will have new options to verify their tax information, the U.S. Department of Education announced Monday.
In March, the Internal Revenue Service suspended its Data Retrieval Tool because of security and identity theft concerns. The tool automatically transferred a family’s tax return information into the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Without the tool, applicants would have had to input tax return information manually.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said FAFSA applicants can now submit a signed paper copy of their 2015 tax return instead of using the Data Retrieval Tool.
She added institutions that use FAFSA no longer need to verify that the applicant or their family members filed a 2015 tax return.
Students and families expressed concerns about being unable to easily access and manually input their tax return information. They were also unhappy the IRS suspended the tool in the middle of the FAFSA filing period for the 2017-2018 school year.
The IRS said it plans to reinstitute a more secure version. The agency announced in early April that up to 100,000 people may have had personal information stolen from the tool.
“While this tool provides an importance convenience for applicants, we cannot risk the safety of taxpayer data,” said IRS Commissioner John Koskinen in a March 30 statement.
DeVos said the new options will make the FAFSA process easier and help applicants the Data Retrieval Tool previously benefited.
The changes applied immediately to both the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 FAFSA processing and verification cycles.
