As colleges receive FAFSA records, some ask: ‘How do we trust this data?’

After months of vexing delays, Brenda Buzynski was eager to see the data from federal financial aid forms start coming in. Finally, the University of Iowa administrator thought, she could begin creating aid officers for thousands of students.

But as the files began flowing in two weeks ago, the university’s director of financial aid was alarmed. Some fields in the processed forms were blank or had the wrong codes. Others had imported incorrect or partial tax data from the Internal Revenue Service. And some had incorrectly calculated students’ eligibility for federal grants.

“The errors just keep accumulating,” said Buzynski. “We need to start packaging awards, but how do we trust this data?”

Colleges and universities are contending with a growing list of technical problems in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which determines a student’s eligibility for grants and loans to pay for school. The errors will probably require the Education Department to reprocess scores of applications, which could further delay when some students receive aid offers. Already, the agency has said it miscalculated about 200,000 records it had processed before March 21. Now, college leaders worry that is only the tip of the iceberg.

It is the latest snag in the tumultuous rollout of the new financial aid form, known as the FAFSA, thathas upended the college admissions season. Students are anxious to know how much college will cost them, but the federal government is making it increasingly difficult for schools to give accurate answers.

In interviews with a dozen college financial aid officers and university presidents, administrators identified at least nine errors in records from the processed aid applications the Education Department has sent them since mid-March. The department has publicly acknowledged some errors but has been quieter about others, frustrating some college leaders.

It is not clear how many students are affected by the errors.

A chief concern among schools is faulty tax data appearing in the records. A 2019 law passed by Congress makes it easier for the IRS and the Education Department to share taxpayer data with parental consent, a transfer that cuts the number of questions parents have to answer on the FAFSA.

But colleges that use another financial aid form produced by the College Board say they’ve compared tax returns from previous years and found that the new FAFSA is not properly retrieving some tax information. When a family has an amended tax return, the form incorrectly uses the original return. The total amount of education tax credits students have received is also inaccurate in some records, as is information about total federal taxes paid.

Buzynski spotted the tax mistakes among the 15,000 records shehas received so far from the Education Department. “I don’t know whether the problem is at the IRS or the department, but clearly they haven’t gotten it right yet.”

The Education Department and the IRS said they are aware of the data retrieval issues. Based on the reports raised, the department does not believe that the issues would affect most of the previously submitted applications, it said in a notice to financial aid professionals Friday.

“The Department and IRS are working quickly to assess the reports and determine if this would affect a subset of applications and if there are system issues in need of resolution,” Undersecretary of Education James Kvaal told The Washington Post in a statement. “We will keep students, families, and schools informed of the status related to these reports and provide additional information as quickly as possible.”

Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said the trade group alerted the Education Department last week after learning about the tax errors andis waiting for more answers.

“It’s like radio silence from the department, other than ‘we received the complaints and are looking into them,’” McCarthy said, though she understands that the agency needs time to do more research and come up with a plan.

Still, McCarthy worries that, without more communication from the Education Department, colleges that lack the resources or capacity to closely analyze FAFSA records mayjustassume that what they have received from theagencyis accurate.

However, skepticism is growing in some corners, especially after the department recently revealed another error in hundreds of thousands of records.

“On the one hand, you want to take at face value that if we receive [records,] they’re accurate,” said Marc M. Camille, president of Albertus Magnus College. “But the ones we’ve received to date have had errors.” The private Roman Catholic college in Connecticut traditionally attracts students with significant financial need and its pool of admitted applicants fits the same profile. Few would-be freshmen have committed so far this spring, which Camille suspects is because they are still awaiting aid awards.