Prior Prior Year (PPY) tax document usage and early FAFSA submission

There are two major changes to the 2017-18 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) application process:

1. Starting this fall, the FAFSA will be available earlier (October 1, 2016 instead of January 1, 2017) for 2017-18.
2. The FAFSA will require information from an earlier tax year. Beginning with the 2017-18 FAFSA, students will report income information from two years prior, rather than one year prior as has been the case in the past. So for the 2017-18 year, students will be using 2015 tax data. The term commonly used to describe this change is using prior, prior year tax data. The advantage is applicants will very likely have completed their taxes for the tax year used on the application rather than using estimated data or delaying applying until their taxes are completed.

As part of these changes the Department of Education is strongly encouraging the use of the IRS Data Retrieval Tool (DRT). This tool, which is part of the FAFSA, allows many applicants and their parents to access the IRS tax return information needed to complete the FAFSA and transfer the required information directly into the FAFSA from the IRS. Students who use this tool are much less likely to be selected for verification, a process by which a student is required to submit additional documentation to support that the data reported on the FAFSA is accurate.

Admissions and financial aid staff have been meeting to discuss how the University will adjust deadlines, application processing, and estimated awards in response to above mentioned changes. Plans are contingent on PeopleSoft providing the technical support needed to successfully implement the new timeline.

The week of September 12, 2016 the ASR-IT financial aid team received a critical fix from Oracle to allow processing of the 2017-18 financial aid application. The critical fix is scheduled to be installed with Bundle #42 on September 25th. However, this is contingent on the outcome of testing; any defects may impact the timeline.

Estimated financial aid award notices for admitted, incoming freshman and transfer students are scheduled to begin going out the last week of January 2017. The priority deadline for financial aid application (for the Twin Cities campus) will remain March 1, 2017.

Actual financial aid award notices for incoming students, and continuing students, are scheduled to begin going out in July after tuition and fees have been approved by the Board of Regents. Students filing the FAFSA early will be notified that the FAFSA has been received and to expect award notices in mid-to-late-July.