The Internal Revenue Service’s Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) is down, a federal tax service tool that assists with the federal student aid application process, due to technical issues. Concerns about a potential security breach prompted the federal government to shut down a key link in the current website that prospective college students use to apply for financial aid.
The link that appears on the US Education Department’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and allows students to automatically download information from their (or their parents’) tax returns stopped working on March 3.
Even though the data retrieval tool is down, the FAFSA can still be completed. Students and their families will need to hand-enter their 2015 tax information into the FAFSA, which may take more time and increases the risk of data entry errors. Finally, as a result of tax data not being imported from the IRS, the Department of Education will likely select more records for verification, increasing workload demands in financial aid offices to manually review these records.
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