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PublicationDate: 4/11/97 Summary: Update Re: 1997-98 Processing Author: OPE - Office of the Assistant Secretary for OPE Date : April 11, 1997 To : Financial Aid Community FROM : Jeanne B. Saunders Director, Application & Pell Processing Systems Division SUBJECT: Update re: 1997-98 Processing This message updates Betsy Hicks' weekly message to the financial aid community and provides information concerning three situations involving 1997-98 processing that many of you have inquired about. . (1) We have received some inquiries from students who have received the postcard acknowledging receipt of their FAFSA, but whose applications have not been processed within the average turnaround time. The majority of these forms were sent to the MDE mailing address in East St. Louis, Illinois: a few were sent to the Mt. Vernon, Illinois location. These applications have all been processed by the MDE; however, due to system problems, those particular transmissions were not received or were rejected by the Central Processing System (CPS). We have been locating these errant batches and are fixing the problems and retransmitting the data to the CPS. A significant number of these forms have already been resolved, and we are continuing to resolve the remaining cases. If you have a student who has received the postcard acknowledging receipt of his/her FAFSA, and who should have received a SAR before now but has not, please ask that student to contact the Federal Student Aid Information Center [(319) 337-5665] to determine whether his/her FAFSA has been processed. If it has not been processed, the FSAIC will ensure that his/her name and SSN are on our list of records that need to be located and reprocessed. (2) A second processing problem occurred with another processor which affected approximately 30,000 applications received on March 7. Although these records were processed by the MDE, they were not accepted by the CPS due to a separate system problem. These transmissions were corrected and resent to the CPS in the afternoon of Thursday, April 10. The resulting ISIRs should be computed shortly and institutions will receive the processed results no later than April 14 or 15. (3) Up until this week, the CPS has been averaging under 50 hours to compute student records. Late last week, the CPS experienced a general, though temporary, system slowdown and this caused the CPS to finish only four computes instead of the normal five. Please note that the volume of records processed will not be affected; the only change you will notice is that the turnaround time will be slightly more than average. Thank you for your continued patience and cooperation. |